Hooray for ugly fruits and veggies! Or not.

The article that I am going to talk about today is from the Guardian, and it addresses the ridiculous aesthetic standards for fruits and vegetables.

Standards are superficial in the US for fruits. I mean c’mon, seriously, minimum lengths for cucumbers, and certain colour requirements for cauliflowers? Seriously? This all sounds like fruit discrimination to me.

what the fork indeed

I think that it is ridiculous how society rejects fruits and vegetables because they are not aesthetically pleasing, even though they all probably taste the same.

From my own personal experience, I bought some fresh grapes the other day at a discount from my local grocery store, and they tasted fine even though they were slightly deformed.

It is tragic how farmers who work hard all year long to produce crops are forced to watch their hard work go down the drain if their fruits and veggies don’t meet the US Department of Agriculture’s aesthetic standards.

In the article, it talks about how Walmart is not receiving much consumer demand for the produce, even though they are pricing these imperfect vegetables at a 30% discount.

As consumers, we should be changing our preferences in order to be more accepting of all fruits and vegetables, so that this travesty does not keep occurring.

please don’t throw us away

Why is it that people are starving in third-world countries, yet we are sitting here being picky about whether our fruits have the certain curves in the right places? Aren’t we living in the 21^st century where we are promoting equality for all, regardless of body shape or colour?

Luckily, it’s not all bad. Companies like smoothie shops and our friends at the Zero Waste Market can buy these imperfect fruits and sell them to customers, or use them to make smoothies, as consumers won’t know the difference on whether or not a slightly bruised orange was used in their making of their smoothies.

My wish is that in the future, we can live in a society where shoppers think that there is nothing wrong with cosmetically imperfect produce. So please, treat all fruits equally so that we can fix this problem and contribute to a waste-free society.

#allfruitsmatter

Hearing the presentation about the Brew Creek Centre, I was definitely inspired by the passion and commitment of Barclay and his team on helping the environment. What really resonated with me was the clear integration between their business and being sustainable as the Brew Creek’s environmental initiatives were evident in everything they did, from their cuisine to their heating systems.

This got me thinking about how this could be an interesting blog post regarding environmental buildings and architecture. This is why I found this particular article by Gizmag that talks about sustainable houses.

What I like about these houses is that they are truly sustainable, and use a whole variety of different materials in order to make them, such as toothbrushes, DVD cases, bamboo, etc.

I’ve picked out a few of my favourites and I’ll let the following photos speak for themselves:

best porch ever

this looks like some rich Bond villain’s home

SO COOL

Connecting this back to the concept of great first, green second, I think that these houses do serve the functionality of a house despite being sustainable. I mean, just by looking at the houses, they do look aesthetically pleasing and don’t seem like some raggedy looking shack that is just concerned about being environmentally friendly. I would even argue that all of these houses look super cool and I would be happy to live in one of them compared to the plain old house that I am currently living in.

I wonder why ordinary people don’t try building one of these houses to live in. Besides the benefits of having a low environmental impact if you are environmentally conscious, I’m sure the energy efficient features and use of natural lightning can save you lots of money on your electricity bills as well.

Anyways, hopefully you liked this post and check out the other low-impact and low-cost articles by Gizmag as well. It’s quite unfortunately how we live in Vancouver, one of the greenest places in the world, and yet we don’t think about building houses like this, because these houses are cost-efficient, environmentally friendly, and amazing.

On the topic of sustainable partnerships this week, I came across this article by Sustainable Brands which talks about this new partnership between companies such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Unilever. What this partnership is aiming to do is to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals set out by the United Nations. These goals include breakthrough innovation, the accurate valuation of nature, engaging employees, etc. Dubbed Paragon Partnerships, the companies want to come together on a quarterly basis for discussion and to tackle key issues surrounding the environment.

My personal thoughts on this are that it does sound very interesting and promising.  What Paragon is trying to do is utilize their network and resources as a joint unit in order to address sustainability and development challenges. They want to raise key questions and uncover troubling statistics and then decide what their action plan should be, and then release this information to the public so that everyone can chime in and help.

The process on how this works is that research will be conducted by the companies, NGOs, and government partners, and then they will post their findings online which people can access, and then decide how they can take action in order to help achieve these goals.

Some of the companies and organizations involved with Paragon Partnerships

In terms of what these goals actually are and who created them, the goals were created by the United Nations, and they want to tackle key issues such as gender equality, quality education, clean water and sanitation, climate action, etc. Check them out at http://www.globalgoals.org/.

Browsing through their website and some of their social media channels, I was initially impressed with what I saw. It seems like this is something that the United Nations have given a lot of thought about and they even have celebrities such as Ed Sheeran and Leonardo di Caprio chiming in.

Your boy Leonardo urging people to take action against climate change

In the future, I’ll be interested to see if this partnership can produce any tangible results. I am a bit skeptical whenever these big companies come together to achieve lofty goals, like achieve X by this certain year. Therefore, I will be curious to see the impact that this partnership has within the next year or five years or so. Achieving all of these goals by 2030 does sound a bit ambitious, but it is good to see these companies taking action and I’m definitely going to do more research on these global goals and see what I could do to help achieve them.

Feel free to watch this video as well giving you a brief rundown over The Global Goals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpqVmvMCmp0

A young girl working in a sweatshop in Bangladesh

Watching The True Cost in class, it was definitely a very powerful and thought provoking documentary as it begged the question, who pays the price for our clothing? I was actually feeling very guilty myself while watching the documentary as I was wearing a shirt that I had purchased for $8 and was wondering just how much of that money went to the workers who made that shirt.

However, to critique the documentary, The True Cost did have a very strong point of view in saying that there are problems that exist within the current fashion industry, but perhaps put too much of the blame on companies for taking advantage of sweatshops and the people living in impoverish conditions. It’s easy to condemn the people who made comments in the video that said they don’t really think much about the poor working conditions in sweatshops and that the people could be doing much worse. But in reality, there is some truth to this as there are indeed worse jobs that people could be having like working in coal mines with even worse working conditions.

This brings me to an interesting article that I read from The Journal, a student newspaper at the University of Illinois. The article talks a bit about Dr.Benjamin Powell’s findings regarding sweatshops, and how there is a general misconception that sweatshops are extremely bad and should be abolished from existence. In reality, the people in these places honestly think that that is the best place to work for them, as they do earn more of a wage than other places, despite the poor working conditions and little to no vacation time.

What surprised me was that Dr. Powell conducted a questionnaire when visiting sweatshops and more than 50 percent of people said that they would not be willing to work for lower pay if the working conditions were improved.

unreal how people would rather have more wages over better working conditions

Overall, I think that there will always be some places in the world that are more impoverish than others and will have looser working regulations, and some companies will be trying to take advantage of these places as they want to be more profitable than their competitors.  This is indeed a very big problem for our society, but it doesn’t just stop at consumers and companies, governments also have to be involved in the conversation. There needs to be more economic development in third-world countries and we all have to do their part in advocating for fair wages and safe working conditions for people worldwide.

First off I apologize for the cringeworthy title.

Anyways, this week we talked about some of the different cradle-to-cradle business models, one of them being upcycling. I’ve always found upcycling to be really interesting as I like the idea of turning old and broken things that ordinary people would discard and then turning them into something new and useful.

One company that I found that practices upcycling is this shop called The Piano Gal Shop.

They are this neat little company which performs different services such as piano tuning, piano selling, music lessons, and they also make artwork out of broken piano parts and other instruments.

The owner, Marta Hansen, utilized her love of music and art into making beautiful pieces of artwork out of old materials which she can actually sell in her store.

“I wanted to do the music store thing, but in a very creative way.”

Some of the pieces of artwork include wall art out of old sheet music, broken pianos into tables, and old records into clocks. Here are some pictures of some of the stuff that she’s made:

On the business side of things, I think it’s great to see a business like The Piano Gal Shop doing something different for a change and making a positive impact on the environment as well as making profits at the same time. They don’t incur any costs as well except time and effort as people donate their broken instruments.

Not only does this reduce waste as these old piano parts and sheet music aren’t going to the landfill, but these items are given a new purpose as Marta adds value to them by turning them into creative pieces of art that people actually want to buy and display in their homes.

All this talk about upcycling has made me pretty excited and motivates me a bit to find items around my house that I would generally discard but now I’ll see if I could turn them into anything useful like Marta.