Rob Ewaschuk's Blog

Pollan on Vegetarianism

In Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan has this to say about his dabbling in vegetarianism:

What troubles me most about my [recently adopted] vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people and, odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience.

Other people now have to accommodate me, and I find this uncomfortable: My new dietary restrictions throw a big wrench into the basic host-guest relationship. As a guest, if I neglect to tell my host in advance that I don't eat meat, she feels bad, and if I do tell her, she'll make something special for me, in which case I'll feel bad. On this matter I'm inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners.

Even if the vegetarian is a more highly evolved human being, it seems to me he has lost something along the way, something I'm not prepared to dismiss as trivial. Healthy and virtuous as I may feel these days, I also feel alienated from traditions I value: cultural traditions like the Thanksgiving turkey, or even franks at the ballpart, and family traditions like my mother's beef brisket at Passover.

I wrestled with my novel dietary changes a bit, but ultimately aimed for (and nearly succeeded at) a vegan Christmas dinner with my parents where I'm comfortable cooking for myself and no one is going to feel bad, but folded entirely to the traditional twelve course Ukrainian Christmas Eve dinner with my extenda-fam, where opting out of the perogies would have been exceedingly poor form.

I think that vegetarianism is common enough, at least among my friends and family, that I don't really buy his argument — it's not very often that I'm the only veggie at a party, and even if I am veggie and it happens that I forget to mention it, I don't think anyone feels really bad about it. But that's just social context — I think if you apply what he's saying to veganism or my special flavour of diet does seem like an imposition.

This is a weird line to walk; if I've decided that, for my day to day life, supporting conventional American factory farming is untenable, why would I let that slide? And yet, these traditions are important, and especially with the recency of my shift it hardly seems fair to induce this breakdown in the host-guest relationship that Pollan speaks of. It's a quandary that I resolve ultimately via social expedience but the rubric of this traditionalism is moderately more satisfying, though Pollan himself doesn't really resolve the issue.

Wow, that last sentence was rubbish.

In other news, I had a nice, relaxing Christmas — the quietest one I've had ever, I think, though my sister and her family arrive tomorrow to add the requisite snow-playing and children-screaming to the holidays. I got a bunch of kitchen- and food-related stuff, which is most excellent.

Home

For the first time since my parents moved away from Saskatoon (and perhaps before then: trips home had already started to feel a bit weird as I grew apart from many — but not all — of my highschool friends), I have a Home. I'm from Toronto now, in some incomprehensible sense, given that I've only ever lived here one year. Maybe in two years I'll be from New York in the same sense, or from somewhere else entirely. But for now, as the overnight Greyhound pulled into the city in the clean early morning light, it was with a strong sense of comfortable recognition — the recognition of a journey I've done a dozen times: the tight curve of the Gardiner offramp and the tower in the distance.

The buildings are tall here, but not even mildly claustrophobic like I find Manhattan to be some days. My initial aggressive approach to boarding the subway was both unnecessary and unwelcome, but my NYC layer sloughed off pretty quickly. People smile at each other as they negotiate the "who gets which seat" dance at the busy subway stops. And a friendly conversation was struck up as our train apparently struggled to make it between St. Clair and Davisville — a stop-and-start failure of no known cause.

Toronto, a bit like my SF trip is instantly filled with people to meet up with. And like my first few trips back to Saskatoon after highschool, it's a gathering place for people who went to Waterloo — the GTA is the main feeding ground for Waterloo. It's also full of Green Party people that I know. Just add beer.

I know the town, I know the people; I know the subway and the currency and the health care system and the neighbourhoods and how to get anything done that I need. I have places to stay, numbers to call, and even a reasonable sense of direction, sometimes. But I think it's mostly about the people.

Home.

Maybe I'll even move back here some day.

Aim for Where You're Going

[Last bit of musings about environmentalism started during my flight to San Francisco]

When I was young, my dad got me involved in Soap Box Derby &mdash building small, aerodynamic, gravity-driven cars and racing them down a hill two at a time. There were all kinds of aspects of it that were important: rigidity of the car, oil choice in the wheel bearings, driver position, but at the end of the day bad steering down the straight track could ruin it all. If you found yourself veering off to the side, my dad taught me to not try to get re-centered in the lane, but just to aim for the center of the finishline — to aim where you want to go.

I recently had a discussion with my sister, who is writing about food and diet, about how at every turn there seems to be an environmental minefield. The topic at hand was local organic food still often having a higher footprint than the same foods bought en masse in grocery stores, because for some unprocessed whole foods the last-mile transport dominates. There are lots of things like this: polystyrene is incredibly low-energy while compostable sustainable paper cups are much higher; small-scale organic clothing operations often sell stuff at exhorbitant costs, which I can only assume is in part because that their small scale means high per-unit footprint along the way in terms of energy, transportation and space usage (think hours of lighting in the shop per unit sold). I support them anyway, because they're aimed where we need to go.

Sometimes things aren't clear, sometimes you have to make judgement calls, sometimes you have to give up on something you wanted to do 'cause it's too damn expensive or complicated, but what matters is that you're pulling things the right way, more than the average around you. In some ways it's a weakform of Gandhi's "Be the change you want to see in the world" that's less demanding when the change you want is really substantial and you don't feel strong enough to rise to that challenge in its entirety.

I think this pretty important, and helpful in navigating things: you should do a lot, but you don't have to do everything. If you're pulling the world in the right direction — and being at least transparent if not forceful about it — I think that's enough.

One Hundred Fifty Dollars of Nom

That's from my first shop at the Food Co-op and in tune with my attempt at a dietary change. Nom nom nom. I bought some canned pumpkin and coconut milk and cilantro, which tomorrow will turn into a delicious soup with any luck.

When I got out of the store it was snowing, and by the time I had biked home with all that on my back and handlebars, there was a nice thick coating on the cars — snow is so pretty.

♥ food.

Murder of One

And I have been to Paris
And I have been to Rome
And I have gone to London
And I am all alone
And I have been to Paris
And I have been to Rome
And I have gone to New York City
And I am all alone
I'm all alone
I am all alone
Counting Crows, Murder of One

Events and conversations finally have made me realize that I'm going to be lonely a bunch for a while (sense 1, hopefully not 2 or 3), that I need to become comfortable with something that I'm really unused to and a little fearful of. But just realizing this has made it something to take on, rather than an inevitable cloud hanging on the horizon. It's good to know what you're working with.

I've never actually been to Rome, either.

Shrinking My Feet

At 19:29:55, I plonked down in a plastic chair beside my sister at the Park Slope Food Co-op after riding straight there from work — "latecomers will not be allowed" the website said of the orientation session, so my timing was most superb.

My sister tells me that, as they went over the various rules of the co-op working system I was nodding vigorously at their excellent policy choices, though I don't remember doing so. Every co-op member has to work 2.75 hours every four weeks. You have to pick a fixed shift (mine is 7am Wednesdays on week B of the four-week schedule), and some shift schedules are popular and thus full, and if you can't take an open one you have to plonk your name on a waiting list before you can join. If you travel a lot they have an alternative, more flexible system; if you don't like your shift schedule you can change to any other open one; if you can't make a specific shift you can trade, but if you just don't show up you owe two. If you fall behind you get suspended, but you have 10 days from the first time you're told you're suspended (at the door of the co-op, to get in) to correct clerical errors or make up your shifts. All very excellent, fair, and accommodating without needing a lot of flexible judgement calls. Apparently it used to be a lot more lax, and the co-op nearly collapsed.

They now have 15,000 members and do $27M/y in business, so nearly $2000 per member per year, though it was unclear to me if that number included suspended and inactive members. It's the largest food co-op in the US, if I recall correctly.

They have a strong environmental policy, and thus this attacks one major prong of the food issue for me: where it comes from, how it's grown, and how it gets to me. The co-op is at a large enough that it's unlikely to suffer from small-scale issues like some farmers' market purchases can (driving a small truck of tomatoes is more expensive per tomato-mile than a large one), and it's careful enough that I hope I can shop there almost without thinking.

The other prong is what I'm actually eating. Thus, complementing this, I've now spent three days dabbling in the diet I've had in mind for a while: vegan plus eggs and dairy only if they're organic and only inasmuch as I "need" to enjoy my food. (You can also call this lacto-ovo vegetarian with all animal products being organic, but I think that description, while perhaps more honest, would result in more confused times when people kind enough to try to match my dietary preferences misunderstand the parameters — "vegan", despite being incorrect, sets the scene better.) My sister has been buying a lot of "know the farmer" meat and I've been dabbling (bacon is yum!), but the aesthetic (and, somewhat, environmental) arguments just won't go away — this is descriptive, not prescriptive, though: I support what she's doing, it's just not the diet for me. But it forced my hand, somewhat: I've never really felt okay about eating factory-farmed eggs and cheese, but I've ignored it as too inconvenient. However, if my sister is managing to find this stuff enough to be eating it reasonably regularly, there's really no excuse any more.

(Hah, I thought this "living alone" stuff might make me stop being a night owl, since the first couple "normal" nights were pretty early for me, but it's 2am and I'm blogging about feet.)

Disjointed

It's weird to be back: it's with a definite sense of disjointedness that I flip my Macbook's timezone back to the right coast, and close the essential Firefox tabs that I've had open for two weeks — the shuttle schedule, Google Maps of the Mission District, Muni and BART info, and various other journeys I needed to make. The trip was excellent in so many ways — finding old friendships, making some awesome new ones, my first opera and trying out yoga, and regrounding myself in a company that's doubled in size since my last trip to HQ and finding myself warmly re-accepted back into the fold.

But it was so soon after I'd gotten to NYC (which in turn was after an unsettled time in Ottawa) that I return with this sense that my apartment is actually just another couch to crash on (minus the couch — need to buy one of those soon!). I decided to put together my kitchen table properly as soon as I got home, and tidy up a bit to combat this sense of placelessness, which is good — now I have somewhere to sit and type! An upcoming visit or two from friends should help build on this — better get that couch.

One of the things I liked about SF was how I didn't really worry as I walked around random streets, so tonight I walked home from my sister's (the route had somehow entered my brain as sketchy) for the first time, and it was totally sane. I don't know what was blocking that before — people here talk about crime a lot more than I'm used to, I guess.

It's also good to be back. My oldest sister and her three wee ones are down from Nova Scotia, though the wee ones are hardly wee, plus of course J, D & j are still here. This is the third (fourth?!) time I've seen the Nova Scotia contingent this year, which is really great. Today we watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, which was kinda cool but generally punctuated by long periods where we couldn't see anything, as parades in Manhattan seem to be.

Now it's time to settle in, and give this damn sleepless city a run for its money.

Thou Shalt Not Externalize

[from my recent flight to San Francisco]

If God had been an economic agnostic economist, he would have saved time by having only one commandment: Thou Shalt Not Externalise. Lying, adultering, killing, coveting: all impose costs on others and on society in general. Killing and other crime imposes the direct cost of crime onto the victim, as well as the social costs of policing and enforcement. Lying and adultery reduce trust in general, and contribute to the breakdown of families. Intuitively I think even coveting imposes a social cost, though I'm not sure exactly how.

A few years ago, I was mulling over some debates I had in university about free markets, the role of individual rights, the existence of group rights, and that sort of thing. I was waiting for a flight, which somehow always makes me a bit reflective — probably in anticipation of the period of calm, uninterrupted time that air travel often offers. Two women ahead of me were discussing flight prices, and per-item baggage fees (new in Europe at the time) and how they hated it, and I had a novel (to me!) thought: putting aside the philosophical rigorand the arguments about efficiency and minimal government intervention and maximal freedom and optimal wealth distribution and maximizing happiness and all that, most people simply don't like certain outcomes of market economics: the need to price shop and to be diligent about carefully worded agreements, the frequent power imbalances, and the intrinsic drive to externalize.

Since last time I flew, there are now per-checked bag fees in the US; this returns some of the true cost of baggage to passengers &mdash a properly capitalist move. The response of the passengers is to maximize use of carry-on bags. The plane can't actually support that when it's full, so the bags don't fit in the overhead bins and have to be brought back to the front through the narrow aisles to be checked —presumably for free — slowing down the departure time for everyone.

None of these actions are unreasonable; each is really very capitalist in nature, yet the outcome seems sour because the incentives are wrong.

I'm on an airplane again, reflecting: this is the most intense externalization of costs I knowingly participate in. It's a business flight and my employer buys offsets, but these still do not come close to internalizing the costs*. For many greenheads, this is "the one thing". "I try to be green, but flying is definitely one exception" is something I've heard a lot, as I've commiserated with likeminded people who struggle with the same stuff I do. Lately I've been thinking of that as analogous to "I support emancipation, so I've really cut back on my household slaves, but out in the plantations I just can't do without them." (It's in some ways very different, obviously. I said analogous, not equivalent.) It shows awareness and resistance to the externality, yet practically speaking I'm still emitting more than my own annual sustainable CO2e emissions during this one return flight which is all that really matters.

* Carbon offsets are priced based on the marginal cost of offsets in a world that's offsetting a tiny fraction of its total unsustainable CO 2e emissions. In order to fully internalize the costs you would need to pay based on the average price of offsetting or reducing our total unsustainable emissions. This is, at least, somewhere in the $50-$400/tonne CO2e range, much more than the $10-$20 of retail offsets .

Arrive

It's with a decided sense of irony that I'm finally writing the complementary post to the last one from a flight from JFK (New York) to SFO (San Francisco). But it's true — this morning I got a kitchen table, four chairs, a rocking chair, and a beanbag chair to supplement the boxes of stuff my dad brought down with him from Ontario (thanks dad!). It turned my kitchen from a depressing one-fork town to a proper-looking place of cullinary enjoyment, and gave me more than the suitcase-load of clothes to rotate through — hurray! Now I just need some food in the cupboards! Moving is "the one thing" I really really can't do independently 'cause I don't drive, and my moving karma is at an all-time low, so if I'm ever in the area when you need help with a move, please let me know.

It's good to be back at work, and I'm slowly settling into my new project and new location; it's pretty weird joining a team when you're the "most senior" employee (by start date) but are rusty and uncertain in your own knowledge from a long respite, and certainly in new turf with its own local culture. I'm not sure I navigated it superbly, but nor did I make an utter ass of myself. I hope. There are several former-Dubliners here too, which has been really nice for having a hook into the goings on of various teams and instant pints-after-work.

I've started learning about New York a bit — Hallowe'en night was fun and involved lots of ambling around lower Manhattan &mdasah; but between work, settling in, hanging out with my sister and her fam, I haven't explore much still. There's no rush though, and it turns out it's a pretty big place so it may take a while.

My apartment is good — I always expect one unanticipated (or, when you're lucky, anticipated!) quirk in any place I rent, and in this case the "Frankie" subway shuttle is louder than I expected: no big deal during waking hours, and it's totally tolerable for sleeping with the windows closed...hopefully by the time it's the season to have windows open I'm used to it. The neighbourhood is hard to gauge. I've met a few of my neighbours, but haven't had much reason to strike out in the immediate vicinity of my building.

I am delightedly shocked with the cycling in Manhattan. It's got a wonderful flow to it, and feels much safer than Dublin (with less attentive drivers making more sudden moves) and even Toronto (cursed streetcar tracks!). Most of my commute is on dedicated bike path on the Brooklyn Bridge (where tourists occasionally start walking across the bridge right in front of you and get a good fright) or the west side bike trail, which is basically uninterrupted cycling. It's really invigorating to have a long cycling commute again, and I'm already starting to be back in decent shape after the no-time-for-exercise election madness in September and October.

So yeah, I arrived, just before I departed again.

Depart

I had arranged for my visa paperwork to be sent to my parents' place — I'd go there for thanksgiving, and maybe we'd drive down that weekend, or maybe I'd bring it back to Ottawa with me. Either way, the key was to try to be in Ottawa for the Tuesday night election results to roll in, and then to get back to New York on Wednesday, to start work on Thursday.

My papers didn't arrive on Friday. When the London office opened on Monday morning, I got a tracking number which said it would be delivered on that day by 17:30. Not bad, I hoped: I'd be able to catch, at worst, the overnight bus to Ottawa, and be in the office for election day. But 17:00, then 17:30 came and went. I called the London office of the courier company, and they said it was maybe misrouted. By Tuesday morning, it turned out it had gone to Windsor instead of Orillia and would take another day.

After much scrambling, I decided to redirect the package to Ottawa, to get ahold of a high-quality scan of the original, and then to bus my butt to Ottawa. I'd get there just in time for the election night party, and then try my luck at the border crossing the next day. One of my friends-from-Finland who now lives in Ottawa with her fella has family in Binghamton, NY, so she was going to take me across the border and visit family. Good deal for all, assuming the border crossing was seamless.

The election night party was...well, we lost our only seat, didn't come really close anywhere, and increased our vote by less than 50%. The party was still fun, but there was certainly a degree of deflation. However, some further analysis gives a pretty good impression...not the success discontinuity that I had come to hope for, but strong steady gains. I think we left around 3am, and I finally made it to bed by 4am. At 7:30, alarm clocks started going off; by 8:15 I was out the door to head to Avis to get our rental car. We took care of that, picked up my stuff, and rolled out.

Fingers crossed, we got to the border. I have only done one land-border crossing in my adult life, and I've never applied for a US visa, so I only had a rough idea of how it would go down. Basically, you talk to the normal border guard, he gives you a yellow piece of paper with your plate numbers on it, and you pull off and go into an office. By then, they have your car keys, your passports, and one (of three) copies of the visa paperwork, so you're pretty stuck. They took my paperwork, and mostly just disappeared, popping out to ask a few questions, then to collect a once-in-a-lifetime 500USD "fraud charge," (presumably you have to pay it again if you are trying to use a different identity. ha.) and to take my fingerprints on the fancy scanner machine. They were friendly and efficient and clear about how the visa worked. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by the whole experience, having braced for the worst.

From there, we drove on to Binghamton, I boxed up my bike and repacked my stuff (it was pretty hastily and hungoverly packed) and I caught a bus onwards to New York.

(Note that this marks the end of my sabbatical; if you've got a sabbatical-specific RSS subscription, it will end here; consider the general feed.)