Photo by Paul Keleher on flickr
I saw a robin this week, which makes it official: spring is almost here. "Almost" as in "when it stops being cold and snowy," which might not be for a while.
This means it's time to start thinking about your garden (or somebody else's). What kind of garden will you grow? What will you put in it?
Will you start plants from seed? Which ones, and how much time will they need? Where will your seeds come from - a catalog? a store? last year's tomatoes?
And just as importantly, garden design. For me, I've got to decide if I'm renting a garden plot in the same spot as last year (which isn't very close to my new house), or if I'll try to get a plot in the community garden downtown, or if there's a dog-proof spot in the yard to grow a few veggies.
If you're not growing a garden, spring is still an important time to get a few things settled. Are you joining a summer CSA? When does the farmer's market open? How much longer until that darn asparagus comes out?
Of course, as I was writing this, it started snowing again. If you need some on-screen garden inspiration because you're not getting any outside, check out MyFolia (I was a beta-tester for it last fall). It's like Flickr for plants.
Alfred U, my alma mater, has eliminated trays from the dining halls. Turns out they're not the first - a quick google shows them joined by Penn State, Colby College, Saint Joseph's in Maine, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Some schools have done the trayless thing as a one-off awareness raising event; others, like Alfred, plunged in head-first. No trays, starting today, was their announcement.
The dining halls are still all-you-can-eat, but diners have to make the decision: Is this worth taking now? Is that worth coming back for?
Compare to the usual M.O. of a student at lunchtime:
"They used to come in, grab a tray, grab something from the grill, grab something from the hot line, get a couple of drinks, put a couple of cookies on their tray. Then they'd sit down," Leckie [a dining services manager] said. "We noticed huge amounts of things coming back. Half a wrap, half a burger."
And the best part - the new system actually works. Here's what they found at Alfred:
The results from two separate test dates on Alfred University’s campus were astounding: Simply by not offering trays, food and beverage waste was reduced by 30 percent, and sometimes up to 50 percent, he said.
“At Alfred University, that equates to approximately 1,000 pounds of solid waste and 112 gallons of liquid waste on a weekly basis,” he said. “That’s a significant amount of waste – more than 15 tons a year in solid waste – that we can keep from going into the county landfill.”
Sustainability in food requires looking at the whole life cycle, from production through transportation to what happens after it's served. Supposedly 25% of food cooked in the US winds up in the garbage (unsupported statistic alert) so this is not a minor issue.