Farmers Market Showcases

It was just a quick shopping trip today to the farmer's market. I picked up the usual: potatoes, green stuff, tomatoes, blueberries, corn on the cob....

There were some visitors of note, and they gave me some refrigerator magnet swag:
(the blueberry sticker was from last week...I created a magnet from it.)



It is easy to be green in Portland, but a person could always be greener. We have curbside recycling. The plastics taken curbside only include items with necks. It is possible to recycle all other plastics, but I've been too lazy to take them to a recycling station, and don't have the space to hang on to them for plastic roundups. I discovered though that there is a full-time drop-off location fairly near to my home. I could do better.

The metro folks also had a mobile garden there, all about natural gardening. Of course this was the day I didn't bring my camera, so blame the Motorola Razr for the poor quality:



Not only is it ecologically sound, I like the idea of native plant landscaping because it should be very low maintenance. For various reasons I am not a fan of gardening.

My special animal was featured:



Finally, there was a big green bus. I wanted to get in and out of the market quickly so I didn't stop, but I should have. They were the Dartmouth students traveling across the country in The Big Green Bus. I did see and like the lettering on the side that said, "Powered by Veggies." That didn't seem a big deal to me, seeing as I have a friend who bought a diesel truck so she could convert it to run on vegetable oil, and there are a lot of biodiesel folks in Portland.

As I drove home (usually I ride the bus with my pink rolling crate, but today Steve stayed home from work and I have so much work to do on my zine) I thought about the message of bio-fuels. It isn't enough to think the answer to oil wars is bio-fuel. Already higher demands for ethanol have led to corn shortages in Mexico. I thought about Kettle Chips and its company fleet of biodiesel cars. They use the oil from their chips to run their vehicles. What if Ruffles or Lays did that? What do those mega-companies do with their used oil? Frito Lay has a systematic plan, cites lots of percentages of Greenhouse Gas reductions, but not many specifics on what they do, and no mention of the vegetable oil waste. What a giant fleet of cars those companies could run on their own waste. That could have a meaningful impact, even if it wouldn't be feasible for every single person who owns a car to convert to biodiesel.