Tiny Choices Survey: Nupur!
By tinychoices | March 5, 2010
Vital statistics (name, age, location)?
Nupur, St. Louis, Missouri, USA. I write a food blog at http://www.onehotstove.
How do you reside (apartment or house, roommates)?
I live in a small apartment in an urban neighborhood with my husband and our dog.
Are your housing decisions dictated by choice or necessity? Please explain.
We choose to live close to our workplaces.
How do you travel (transit, car, etc)? Are your travel decisions dictated by choice or necessity? Please explain.
We walk to work, and although we own a car, we use it only on the weekends. We live in a very walking friendly neighborhood and can walk to do many errands, and there is a huge park only a few blocks away. St. Louis does have some public transport, for which I am very grateful, but having a car gives us a lotof freedom to go to places where the bus/metro won’t go.
Tell us about a Tiny Choice you’ve made in your life.
I choose to cook on a daily basis, because that is the best way I can guarantee that the food I eat is fresh, made from quality ingredients, cooked to my taste, and nutritious.
What is the one environmental dilemma you personally struggle the most with?
Throwing compostable waste in the trash. We generate only 1 medium bagof trash every week (and about 2 bins of recyclables every month) but I feel quite sad that most of my trash consists of compostable things, like vegetable and fruit peels, coffee and tea ground and eggshells. I have not able to get a compost bin started- there’s so little space under my sink and where else would I put it?
What is one Tiny Choice you can make in that direction?
We’re thinking of renting a place with a backyard (for the dog) and I’l lstart a compost bin just as soon as I can. I’m reading up on it.
What is the one environmental Tiny Choice you make that people question (in either a positive educational or a negative hassle way) you the most about?
I don’t eat meat or poultry or seafood, and people are always interested in knowing why. Sometimes they ask me about it in a curious way, in which case I am happy to explain and discuss it with them. Sometimes, they just want to start an argument, and that’s when I explain that it is a personal choice and change the subject. I don’t believe everyone has to stop eating meat but we would benefit enormously by eating less of it.
What is the one environmental Tiny Choice you would like every single person to adopt?
Learn to cook, and as you do so, learn more about buying foods locally, using seasonal foods, and minimizing food waste. There are so many benefits to doing this. Cooking is a fun and creative process and can bring family and friends together. Cooking from scratch means that you are consuming less processed food, and cutting down on food packaging waste. We eat several times a day, every single day, and choices around food make a huge environmental impact.
Do you feel like you make sacrifices for environmentalism? Please explain.
No, I live a very comfortable and privileged life and whatever smallchanges I make for the environment only improve my own life by making it cleaner, simpler, less wasteful and happier.
Are you generally: optimistic, pessimistic, neutral about environmentalism and the future?
In general, I am a pessimist and pretty melancholic by nature. My heart sinks as I see what is going on in the world around us (and realizing my own role in it). But I feel empowered by being able to make small changes in my own life to hopefully improve the way we live on this planet.
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Topics: Surveys | 3 Comments »
3 Comments
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Have you checked out Bokashi for your food waste. This can be one of teh better options for limited space. you don’t need one of their fancy buckets, any bucket with a good lid will do and you just put in some old newspaper to soak up the ‘juice’. With a car you can they easly drive the finished stuff off to a place where you can bury it or add it to an existing compost pile.
Nupur, wanted to point you towards a post I wrote awhile back, Four Ways to Compost Indoors… hope it’s helpful!
Pipp- The Bokashi sounds very interesting!
Jenn- Great post- I’m going to see which of these works best for me. Thanks for pointing this out.