Is it normal to cry over rotten produce?

Plus: The ethics of hunting, and icing your drinks with glaciers.

Content warning: I talk about food stuff, including climate orthorexia.

Do you cry over rotten produce?

Well, I have, when some vegetables or—heaven forbid—some fruit from our CSA has gone bad in the fridge or on the counter before we could eat it. And I’m not talking about a few delicate drops, but ugly outbursts—sour, bitter, angry tears.

I have asked myself if it’s, ahem, normal to melt down over a melon or a head of lettuce.

Source: The open door to independence; making money from the soil; what to do--how to do, on city lots, suburban grounds, country farms.

On the whole, I think not.

With time and distance, I can recognize that my physical and emotional response to food waste is perhaps disproportionate to the crime. But in the moment, it feels like a catastrophe. I tell myself that the next time this happens—as it inevitably will—that I will remain calm, cool, and collected. (But, in the back of my mind: Really it would just be best if I never let food go bad again, and avoid this scenario altogether. Much easier.)

Now, why do I behave this way? That’s a thorny knot to untangle. Part of it is my (innate? learned?) frugality. I don’t like waste, in general. (And I don’t think it’s the same as how other people ‘don’t like waste,’ but I won’t be elaborating at this time.)

Growing up, I was encouraged to eat every last grain of rice on my plate—and if I didn’t, my dad would. And now, as a climate and environmental journalist, I am well-versed in the climate and environmental harms associated with food waste. So I have thoroughly internalized the belief that finishing your food (whether on the plate or in the fridge) is the Good thing to do. The moral, the correct, the right behavior.

Then I came across the term “climate orthorexia”—obsessive ‘clean’ eating for environmental reasons—while reading Britt Wray’s book, Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety. It gave me pause. Is there something wrong with me? Have I taken this too far? I don’t have a history of restrictive eating—I’m not even a strict vegetarian! I purposely built-in wiggle room (“mostly vegetarian”) into my dietary preferences to make it easier to sustain for the long haul.

No, I decided, I am most certainly not a climate orthorexic. But is it possible that climate anxiety is contributing to my Big Feelings about Food Waste? Absolutely. Is it the only reason? No.

Source: The open door to independence; making money from the soil; what to do--how to do, on city lots, suburban grounds, country farms.

As I wrote in the introduction to my interview with Wray for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, I didn’t initially think her book was for me: “My job, after all, is writing and editing stories about climate crisis, so I felt I had already found my purpose, and also—arrogantly—that I knew this stuff, generally.

“Of course, by the time I finished the book it was littered with post-it notes, indicating sections worth re-reading. In fact, I did not know this stuff, certainly not all of it. And there was a lot that resonated with me as a person, and as a journalist.”

If you’re interested in probing your own climate and environmental anxieties, I highly recommend reading the book or checking out Wray’s newsletter. Our conversation is a good place to start.

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What I’m reading

Thanks, I hate it: This startup harvests glacier ice from fjords in Greenland and ships it to the United Arab Emirates to fill the glasses at upscale cocktail bars. Oh, and the company says this is “environmentally friendly and of social value.” I don’t know about that, but you can see why the optics are so bad. [Ole Ellekrog for The Guardian]

A good corrective: An Outside columnist wrote that it was ethical and defensible and even beneficial to hunt and kill a large Alaskan brown bear to make a rug. Thankfully, the magazine published this important response, which boils down to “no, it’s not.” [David Stalling for Outside]

McKibben on voting: I also interviewed Bill McKibben for the Bulletin’s recent magazine issue on what YOU can do to stop existential threats to humanity. I’ll pull out one highly relevant section, as we head into an election year:

I get why people get discouraged, but I don’t completely understand it, either. Because it does not strike me that voting is a kind of moral act. It strikes me as a completely practical act.

You’re not trying to pick a great person, you’re trying to pick the person, that in a binary choice, will be better than the other one, that you’ll be able to pressure more than the other one, that might listen to you some. And those choices always seemed very obvious to me. But it also is really important that people continue to understand that politics isn’t just about voting. The day after Election Day, and the month and the year after are just as important, because you’ve got to keep the pressure on all the time if you want change. So let’s hope that people swallow their disgust and go out to the polls. Because you know, in the autumn of even numbered years, you have a lot of power, in your vote. The rest of the time, you have to figure out other ways to have power.

Finally, on Substack: A very good post that sums up many of my feelings about this platform, and why I’m not moving my newsletter to a different one at this time. [Jeanna Kadlec in astrology for writers]