Cheating, AKA accidental greening

I love accidental greening - when I realize I've done something green but without really meaning to.

Like today. It got to around noon and the cupboard looked a bit bare, but I figured I could conjure some pretty passable burritos from a packet of tortillas that had been lurking in the fridge for weeks, a tin of black beans, a frozen tub of fresh salsa and the organic avocados which had been ripening on the kitchen windowsill. A squeeze of lime that was lying around and a carton of sour cream from the village store and we were in business.

My sloppy housekeeping caught up with me again this evening (still haven't entirely got the hang of this weekly shop thing; old NY habits die hard). As the hubby picked me and Dot up from our walk on his way home from Narrowsburg, I realized I'd forgotten to ask him to grab something for supper while he was there. Because of the petrol implications there was no way I was going to ask him to go back. Luckily he remembered we had some pasta and fresh puttanesca sauce left over from the other night, so that was supper.

What's so green about this? I'd managed to hoodwink the hubby into a meat-free day without his noticing (what is it with men and meat?). And, per Ideal Bite, eating no meat is so much better for the environment. To wit:

• It takes 300 gallons of water per day to produce the food in a vegetarian diet, while a meat-eating diet requires more than 4000 gallons of water per day


• A vegan’s diet consumes just 219 gallons of oil per year, while a vegetarian diet uses 303, and a meat-eater's uses 401


• If the USA reduced meat consumption by 10%, we would free more than 12 million tons of grain a year – enough to feed 60 million people

So I reckon it's Meat-free Tuesdays from now on. The fact that the only meat we can get hold of up here during the winter (while our usual supplier of organic and grass-fed meat (River Brook Farm) is closed) looks like roadkill or radioactive waste (not to mention the fish, which is positively putrid) should make this pill a little less bitter to swallow.

For her part, Dot's decided to subsist solely on a diet of the New Scientist:

Oh damn, I better go - I think I just missed the one line dedicated to 'global climate change' in the president's hour-long State of the Union address - the first time he's ever mentioned it. Wait, here it is, courtesy of thinkprogress.org:

Bush said: “For too long our nation has been dependent on foreign oil. And
this dependence leaves us more vulnerable to hostile regimes, and to terrorists
who could cause huge disruptions of oil shipments … raise the price of oil … and
do great harm to our economy.”

He mentions it in order to scare us even more about the bloody terrorists. Plus ca change...