Tag eco

Environmentally Friendly Eating

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy Leave a comment
Will I Get to Taste Something? Anything?

Growing up in Ireland, I often found myself wandering the hills above my home in summertime. I never knew what a “water bottle” was, nor did I feel the need to bring a snack. It was all there for me. Provided by Mother Nature. Free.

Mountain springs delivered brain-freezing, crystal-clear water. Dainty wild peas, button mushrooms, hazelnuts, cherries & blackberries. Sorrel, both leaves & flowers, sloes & tiny wild strawberries. And those fraocháin! The wild European bilberry that is like a blueberry, only smaller & more tart. Feasting on those guaranteed you would go home with purple hands, face & teeth. My mouth waters!

Such gustatory memories prompted me to plant trees & shrubs last spring. In the hope of reproducing the joys of eating the fruits, fresh from where they grew. Just like when I was growing up. I planted cherry, pear & plum trees. Along with blueberry shrubs & some herbs. Naturally, the little fruit trees produced nothing that first season. And I only got to eat one blueberry (delicious!) from all the work it took. My basil, sadly, was attacked by some tiny bug that caused all the leaves to wilt & die! It was such a disastrous planting season that I was greatly relieved to see the first green shoots on all the trees & shrubs this spring. My trees had at least survived the winter. Then the blossoms came, a display of nature’s bounty promised. I was getting very optimistic now.

Until this weekend!

All the new growth on my cherry tree is being destroyed by aphids. There are black dots on the many little plums that sprouted on my plum tree. Plum sawfly, I’m told, is the problem. So my plums are shot for this year. While the fruit stems on my pear tree, with the tiniest little pears on them, have all shrivelled up & died too. Nothing left but the blueberries to hope for now.

How is this possible? Everything seemed to provide copious amounts of fruit when I was a kid. And that was in the wild to boot. Now, it seems like I can’t grow anything but weeds in a suburban garden?

So much for eating organic, environmentally friendly food from my own garden. Next year, I’m going to spray & spread every unpronouncable chemical from the garden centre on them. I’d like to see those fruits develop to the point where the crows & racoons will enjoy them. Then I can bitch about the critters next year!

Okay, I really don’t want to do that chemical thing. If you know, please let me know what I should be doing instead.

Still haven’t made it back onto the dietary wagon yet, so I’m happy to have something to moan about!?! 🤪😁

Let Them Eat Plastic!

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy Leave a comment

Steel Water Bottle

Let Them Eat Plastic!

I watched a CBC Marketplace show the other day. It might have been a rerun of an older one, but it was all about plastic water bottles. We’ve all heard the horrible stories about plastic in the ocean impacting fish, whales, and so on but this one was about their potential impact on us. The show folk ran around buying brand name water from four cities across Canada and they brought them all to McGill University, in Montreal. Here, they ran tests on them to see if there were tiny plastic particles in the water we like to drink.

There were! It turned out these particles, though to a lesser extent, were in some glass bottled waters too.

For the most part, I choose to drink tap water. It runs through the filter on my fridge. Though I often hit the reset button on the change light when it comes up, rather than change the filter right away. As it turns out, some of these commercial water bottles are filled with tap water too. Sure, it’s filtered while being bottle but, sometimes, we’re just paying a silly price for tap water. And the environmentally unfriendly plastic bottle comes along for the ride. Who knew!

It seems that there’s so much of this stuff going around these days, & not just from water bottles, that it shows up in our oceans, lakes and rivers. And they can detect them in the fish we eat. So are we now eating and drinking micro-plastic particles?

Now nobody really knew if these plastic particles were doing us any harm. But that’s sometimes the case with such things, often for years, and then all hell breaks lose. While they figure all that out, we might be better off not drinking water coming in plastic bottles. It’s not that I have 100% faith in the water quality coming from our municipalities either. But if the bottled water is coming from the same source, but with added plastic particles, I think I’ll stick with the regular tap water for the most part.

I guess I’m a bit of a closet tree-hugger. I’m far too macho to be going around openly trying to save the planet. I want to pillage it and get rich! But while I do that, I’m going to dig out my stainless steel water bottle to remain hydrated! 🙂

Now I’m worried about the poor folk at the water bottling plant being out of work. Modern living is way too complex sometimes.

Note from yesterday’s post … the debreceni sausage wasn’t to my taste. I’ve had really good debreceni before, it’s just this one that I didn’t like. The recipe, however, was good so I’ll try it again with another sausage. Regardless, and in retribution, I behaved really badly afterwards. I ate lots of sea salt & caramel chocolate bark with my cherry ice cream. Twice! Oops!!!