In the wake of the current credit and banking crises, many pundits have been predicting that the presidential candidates will have to curb their proposed spending plans drastically when the winner takes office in January. With home foreclosures skyrocketing, pumping money towards renewable energy may seem like a luxury. Yet, an investment in these technologies could create jobs and set us on the path to energy independence. Though the initial investment might be high, the cost of feeding our oil addiction may prove much higher.

Aside from voting and petitioning our state and federal representatives, there’s little we can do as individuals to impact federal spending on eco-friendly options. However, on a micro level, we have a chance to save both money and the earth through the many little (and the few big) choices we make on a daily basis. Just as with the federal government’s expenditures, being “green” may cost a little more up front, but could save us money in the long run.

In a recent piece at Grist, Miles Grant observes notes an obvious parallel between tips to help you save money – and tips to help you save the environment:

Who are you to deny me my two-car garage filled with junk, an elegant dining room I’ll never use, and massive heating/cooling bills?

That’s the basic response from critics when greens question McMansions in particular and our consumer culture in general. I mean, isn’t newer, bigger, better the American way? Didn’t President Bush urge us to go shopping more?

But one financial advisor says trying to look rich by buying so much stuff is keeping some Americans from being rich. And while he never once mentions the environment, his prescriptions for building your savings have a lot in common with tips for cutting your environmental impact.

Being green and being frugal aren’t mutually exclusive, you see. Oftentimes, the two go hand in hand.

This year’s Blog Action theme is poverty; because I’m all about intersecting oppressions (such as classism, environmental destruction and the role of the megatheocorporatocracy in each), I thought I might offer some food-related tips for positively impacting your cash flow and your ecological imprint. Since we’re in the midst of the Vegan Month of Foods – for which I’ve been baking, cooking, drying and otherwise experimenting like mad – I’d like to focus on food, specifically, how one can eat green to save green.

Grow your own food…

Growing your own fruits and veggies is a fun way to save some money. As I wrote in my first VeganMoFo post, there’s nothing more satisfying than cultivating the earth, planting little seedlings and watching them grow, coveting that first grape tomato until it’s red and ripe, and then savoring the food you’ve nurtured all on your own. Whether you live on a lush 20 acres or in a small, third-story apartment, you can grow something, even if it’s just a small patch of herbs on the windowsill. Though it’s impossible for most of us to be entirely self-sufficient and off-the-grid in these modern times, growing your own food can help cut down those food bills – particularly if fruits and veggies comprise the bulk of your diet.

To get started, check out the gardening section at about.com. The “Small Space & Urban Gardens” and “Container Gardening” are of specific interest to those with small or indoor garden spaces.

…and preserve it for the coming winter!

If you have a garden of any size, you probably find yourself with more food than you can possibly eat in one season. If this is the case, look into methods of preserving your food. Canning, dehydrating, drying, freezing, vacuum sealing – all are viable options with varying start-up costs and skill levels. Use the internets to find more information.

If you enjoy toiling away in the kitchen – but don’t have a spot to grow veggies – team up with a friend or family member to split the work and responsibilities. Recruit a fellow frugal enviro with a yard to grow the produce, and pledge to preserve the bounty when it starts to overfloweth. Or volunteer to do the gardening if your BFF will can all the goodies. Share the start-up costs, workload and food. Strength in numbers, am I right?

Go Veg!

Even apart from animal welfare concerns, our insatiable desire for meat has grave environmental concerns: according to the U.N., factory farmed animals are responsible for 18% of greenhouse gases; ranching is the major driving force behind global deforestation; feedlot pollution washes into water, killing coral reefs and creating dead zones; and, overall, meat and dairy production are an inefficient use of food and water, such that “the 4.8 pounds of grain fed to cattle to produce one pound of beef” and “it takes a staggering 990 litres of water to produce one litre of milk.”

Meat and dairy are also bad, bad, bad for our health; E Magazine notes, “There is some evidence to suggest that the human digestive system was not designed for meat consumption and processing (see sidebar), which could help explain why there is such high incidence of heart disease, hypertension, and colon and other cancers. Add to this the plethora of drugs and antibiotics applied as a salve to unnatural factory farming conditions and growing occurrences of meat-based diseases like E. coli and Salmonella, and there’s a compelling health-based case for vegetarianism.” And don’t forget the bird flu!

If you’re thinking about going veg*n (i.e., vegetarian or vegan) – or even if you’re just looking to reduce your meat consumption – there are a plethora of resources online. Google “go veg” – or hop on over to easyVegan.info (my AR blog) and have a look at the blogroll.

My dad, who’s been a vegetarian for 40+ years and used to do his shopping in a small co-op located in the basement of a Unitarian church, will tell you that there’s never been a better time to go veg than now. Even the Cheesecake Factory has vegan options!

Buy in Bulk

Join a CSA and/or join a wholesale store such as Sam’s Club (they have Boca Burgers!) or Costco. If you can’t use or store such large portions, pair up with a friend or family member, and divvy up your purchases.

On the enviro side, bulk purchases usually reduce the amount of packaging you consume.

Buy Generic

Generic and name-brand food is usually similar enough that you won’t notice a difference. When in doubt, buy one of each and sample them side-by-side; who knows, you may even like the no-name option better!

BYOB – Bring Your Own Bag

Invest in a few high-quality canvas tote bags. Keep them in your car (if you own one; that’s another green quandary altogether!), and use them every time you shop.

Some stores will give you a small refund if you return and reuse their grocery bags; other businesses, such as Whole Foods, will give you a discount if you bring your own bag, no matter what type it is.

Americans plow through plastic bags to the tune of 100+ million per year. The lucky few (2%) will be recycled, but even these use up precious petroleum and natural gas and are sometimes decorated with lead, a toxin. Most end up in landfills, or become ocean litter, sapping life from the creatures which reside there. Reusable cloth bags can help to break this pattern of pollution.

As an added benefit, if you’re forced to budget precious sack space while shopping, you just might find that you stop making unplanned impulse purchases that you don’t really need.

Got any food-related tips for saving money/saving the planet? Leave ‘em in the comments!

(Crossposted to.)

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Tagged: blog swarm blog carnival blog action day blog action day 2008 poverty food gardening diy green environment frugal money go veg fruits veggies plastic bags veganmofo vegan vegetarian

I had hoped to either save it or make an extra mortgage payment, but no go.

At no time did the thought of squandering it on luxury goods cross our minds.

* On the plus side, the Amazon points I earned through those crazy credit card charges will buy a small library. Ripley, here I come!

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Tagged: rebate checks

Anyway, Cheryl from New Mexico kind of irritated me:

DON LEMON: Here’s what Cheryl from New Mexico writes: “I no longer shop online, and I don’t use credit cards except in an extreme emergency. And that is almost never.”

Zum, what’s with all the hating on the credit cards and the internets? As long as both are used responsibly, they can help you save money.

Let’s start with the credit cards, since they’re a wee bit more difficult to defend than the internet. As long as you know how to play the system, credit cards can be pretty durn useful. For starters, don’t charge more on a card than you can easily pay off – in full – the next month. Inexplicably, banks are exempt from usury laws, such that 36% interest rates are the norm. So I’m definitely not saying that you should run out and charge expensive items that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. Overspending, bad. Interest charges, bad. Greedy banks, bad. No argument there.

But as long as you stay within your budget, charging everyday items is a good thing. You can increase your credit score and earn rewards from your credit card company. (I earn $25 Amazon gift certificates, usually to the rate of 1-2 a month. How do you think I fund all those book piles?) And I’ll only pay with credit when shopping on eBay – if the seller ends up being a fraud, I can contest the charges. Not so much if I pay via a cash transfer from my bank, something that Paypal always seems to be pushing, the the point of harassment.

The “Credit cards, evil!!!1!!” meme is especially annoying, perhaps because this is something I’ve been hearing lectures about since I got my own card. Back when I first moved in with Shane, when I was still in college, I worked at a local grocery store part-time. Since I was already there, and I hated wasting time with the unpaid, forced half hour lunches I had to take during every shift six hours or longer, I did all the grocery shopping for us, usually during my lunch break. I could not believe the admonitions some of the guys (they were always guys) in the grocery department would give me about paying for groceries on my credit card! As though I was going to blow my paycheck on shiny glass jars of peaches or something. We wimmins, just can’t be trusted with plastic. We have an extra special femaley spending gland, located somewheres down near the ovaries, donthchaknow?

In retrospect, my store was filled with Nice Guys ™, probably of the concern troll variety. I just didn’t have the blaming skillz to call ‘em out harshly as I should have. Patriarchy-blaming is yet another gift the internets has bestowed upon this featherhead.

Which brings me to Cheryl’s misguided internet hating.

I’m at that weird age where I can remember growing up without the internet, but was still a (very) young adult when it exploded in popularity. I can recall, with little fondness, doing all my gift shopping at the local mall because really, what the fuck else was there? The prices were ridiculous, the selection pathetic, the stores crowded. It sucked shriveled white CEO manballs. Most of the time, especially around x-mas time, I’d settle for the closest-to-best or least objectionable gift I could find, out of options and time. Usually it was a knickknack that the recipient sure as hell didn’t need, or a piece of clothing he or she would never wear. Junk, mounds of it.

Among other things, the internet revolutionized shopping. Now I can actually purchase gifts that my friends and family will like and use. Living in the middle of the country, I can buy gifts from local NY stores – gourmet food, even! – and have it delivered. I can buy hard-to-find books and indie magazine subscriptions that I never would have had access to pre-internet. Hello, knowledge! Is there a better gift? And your gift doesn’t even have to be “stuff” – I can, say, make a donation to one of thousands of nonprofit organizations that match the recipient’s ethics and priorities. The possibilities are endless.

And don’t even get me started on the comparison shopping. Used to be, you’d have to drive from store to store, save receipts, and average out the totals to find out which grocery store had the best deals overall. Can we say wasting gas? For the bigger ticket items, maybe you could call around, but that only worked as long as the sales associates accommodated you. Like, if you knew exactly what you wanted – item, model and style. At near-minimum wage, they weren’t about to sit on the phone with you all afternoon and price every damn tv in the store.

Now you can do all this via Google in the time it’d take you to drive to your destination. Unless you’re a genuine shopping addict, this choice and convenience is un-fucking-paralleled. It saves time, money, gas.

Seriously, I don’t know how the world (my world, at least) went round pre-1994, the year my family finally got an internet connection. AOL Dialup, but still.

Anywho, the rest of the audience feedback was sound. Larry and Shiraz are on to something.

KEILAR: Larry is cutting back on using gas. He writes: “I live about five miles from work, and I have a scooter that gets about 110 miles per gallon. I used to get teased about using it, but look who’s laughing now!”

LEMON: Right.

KEILAR: That’s right, Larry, for sure.

LEMON: OK. Shiraz is trying a bunch of new things to save money. He sent us this list. Here’s what he says: “Paying bills online, stuffing the washing machine before I run it, considering renting my home and moving in with friends to help with their mortgage. I gave up my home phone number, and I’m using samples of soap and shampoo.”

Wow.

KEILAR: Shiraz is serious about this.

See how Shiraz pays his bills online? Now that’s what I’m talking abut.

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Tagged: online the internet cnn money green credit cards credit shopping shopping online