everything in a pint of ice cream

another oldie, from 23 August 2005. My affinity for Ben and Jerry's remains unchanged, but I think the "all-time high" gasoline was something like $2.30 at the time.

This is the kind of thing that garnered me a "Most Likely to Start a Cult" award from my own MBA classmates.

I want to write everything, but it won't fit.

If I didn't have to take the time to nail down a series of words, sometimes coherent, expressing the way I feel and what I think, my thoughts would be much more accurate. It's the same thing being a musician, when the only tangible elements of a vast creative landscape in ones head are squeezed out like an empty tube of toothpaste. Musical inspiration came largely from capturing something the moment it was made--the "record everything" maneuver--or going with the flow of a new idea, leaving mounds of unexplored ideas trapped behind in the recesses of the mind. It's kind of like that. Just picking a subject to write about is a pain because that ignores all of the others.

And they're all connected. That's what I do with myself, figure out how they are all connected. How do you write about that? With an example, maybe.

Suppose you were inclined to head to the local mart and pick up a pint of the supreme ice cream of ice creams, Ben & Jerry's. If you're me, you would choose the Coffee Heath Bar flavor, whose exact name I forget. So you hop in the car, drive X miles to the mart, pick up the B&J, and head for home. Simple enough.

So what has occurred? You have traded money for a good--stuffs, product--pretty common. What else happened?

For one, you drove your car to the mart and back. It consumed some gasoline, a little oil, spent time travelling on the highway, parked in a space at the mart, used more gasoline and oil, spent more time on the road, and ended up wherever you park it.

I don't suppose I need to mention that gas prices are at an all-time historical high (not the "real" price, the actual cost compared to inflation--that peaked in the early 80's), and chances are quite good that you spent more in gas to get the ice cream than you did to buy the ice cream. You also converted that gasoline into three times its weight--pretty nifty, eh?--of emissions, notably greenhouse gases. And, you added another car to the roads, which contributed to the congestion that was already there. At the store, you parked your car which doesn't really affect anything, but someone built the parking lot or provided the space for that to happen. And when your car is not there, the space is a 5' x 10' plot of paved over real estate that no one's doing anything useful with.

Now, how about the ice cream? It came from somewhere, and in this case it happens to be Vermont. Since the chances are extremely good that you are not in Vermont, it had to be driven by a refrigerated truck from Vermont to the store. If the ice cream was being stored somewhere else in the meantime--not too likely with ice cream--the truck had to move it between multiple locations. This truck also creates three times its fuel's weight in emissions, may very well travel thousands of miles, and most likely gets worse mileage than you. If I was to price out the actual amount of fuel/emissions used to transport your container of ice cream, the proper way to do it would be to the total fuel/emissions by how many containers of ice cream, and everything else, there were in the truck--something people who tell you that your food travels half-way around the world does not bother to do. After dividing it up between all of the other ice cream/bananas/coffee, it's probably a 10,000th or 20,000th of that.

Anyway, the ice cream has traveled from Vermont in a refrigerated truck however many miles, using X pounds gasoline, emitting 3X pounds emissions.

Still with me? Hang on...

What about the ice cream itself? Ben & Jerry's has gone out of its way to use local items in its food. In this particular case, the coffee B&J use in my own addictive concoction comes from South America, but is Fair Trade coffee--a fancy name for paying someone what their coffee is actually worth. Crazy concept, huh? But how did you think that products made somewhere else cost less? Because the sellers aren't being paid what the product would be sold for if it was purchased in America!

Anyway, B&J does what it can to use fair trade products, local ingredients, recycleable containers, and milk from non-RBGH cows (which I won't go into here, but RBGH is nasty stuff), all of which you would call sustainable practices. This means simply that the practices can be continued indefinitely--which you would think was another obvious concept, but you'd be wrong. However, for B&J local can mean brownies from New York City, still quite a haul. So there is more travel involved there.

Now, what I do is look at all of these components and try to figure out how to reduce all of the expenditures that have taken place here: gas and oil usage, emissions production, time loss, road congestion, and so on. This is a complex mess. But, there are simple concepts that enable me to look at it differently and see how things could be improved.

For starters, if you remembered to get the ice cream when you got all of your other groceries, you have saved yourself the trip. This saves you gas and oil, emissions, time, and congestion, though we usually tend to notice time and road congestion the most, with fuel and oil rapidly creeping up. What else?

How about if you rode a bike or a bus instead? Sacrifice some time, but gain gas and oil, emissions, and maybe congestion if you have bike paths or take the sidewalk. The bus was already going there anyway. But think--if you don't take the car, you don't need a parking space--or as large of one. If twenty-five people did that, you'd only need half the parking lot, the space of another decent-sized building--or a small park.

You could, if you were in a position to do so, move close to the store. Then you could just walk or bike and not drive at all. Not that difficult for us city folk, but more of a long-term investment.

This is where it gets more interesting.

Suppose (and this is a big one for me as well) you instead chose the local ice cream, made twenty miles away at the local dairy plant. What have you saved? Its share of the gas, oil, emissions, and time that the truck spent on the bringing the ice cream from Vermont. You have also saved its share of the extra gas spent to refrigerate it, and the congestion on the road--but you can't really tell the difference on that one unless you cancel a whole truck. As far as all of the components in the ice cream are concerned, you'd have to check with the plant. But you can see that there are more impacts than someone would usually think about.

When people buy local organic food, there is often a premium. This premium represents a lot of things--it could be buying local ingredients at real, rather than discounted, prices. It could be paying adequate wages to the employees. And it could be because they are engaging in sustainable practices--making sure that the land and energy used is replenishing itself. This usually means less production, to keep up with natural processes.

Now, suppose a small store selling locally-made products moves in a few blocks from where you currently are. You could walk there, pay a slight premium, and go home. You only directly see the money, but you have in fact saved yourself gas, oil, time, congestion, product travel time, product refrigeration time, and you've boosted the economy of someone a few miles away, not a few states away. I don't know about you, but to me that's a tradeoff I am willing to make--though recently I've tried to just not buy the ice cream in the first place.

And that's just ice cream. I think about manufacturing plants at this point. Fortunately, so do the companies that own them, because it has become obvious that any waste produced at any point in the production process is wasted money--it represents materials, product, and labor that has been paid for but not used. So you see now that sustainable practices are merely more efficient practices. The trick is then to picture how an ideal process would work, instead of how to merely improve upon the current one. An ideal process produces no waste at all. Usually this is done by reducing all the waste that one can, then reusing, selling or recycling the rest. Nobody's perfect, but