Want to tell the world about the PB&J Campaign without even opening your mouth (wouldn’t be polite with your mouth full = while you’re fighting global warming, water pollution, and habitat destruction)? We’ve just opened up the PB&J Campaign Store online as part of our new website launch, so now’s your chance to tell the world about how to go green by grinning, chewing, and just pointing at your shirt.
I don’t know if you’re the type that likes to wear your lunch on your shirt, but how about America’s favorite eco-friendly sandwich? We’ve tried out some different designs to get a feel for what looks best on fabric, and we’ve landed on the cartoon PB&J with some text for the basic message and our website.
Fed up with the PB&J puns? Are we spreading it on too thick? That’s the last one, I promise. On a more-serious note we’re happy that the tee shirt is made from organic cotton (cotton is typically grown in a sea of pesticides; see this web page for more info), and each sale puts a few more dollars to work at spreading the word about how you can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, save land, and conserve water by deciding to eat lower on the food chain next time you pack your lunch or order at a restaurant.
The mission of the PB&J Campaign is to combat environmental destruction by reducing the amount of animal products people eat. We have chosen to advance that mission by encouraging people to eat more meals that are based on plants rather than on animal products. We use the PB&J as an example of a comfortable, familiar, and of course yummy lunch that is based on plants. If you can eat a PB&J (or a bean burrito, or falafel, or black bean soup…), you can make a difference; it’s that easy
Another approach is to reduce the portions of animal products people eat when they do eat animal products. If the goal is to reduce animal product consumption by half, that’s accomplished if everyone puts one slice of bologna on their sandwich instead of two, if they share the hamburger and order extra fries to make up the difference, or if they double the beans in the chili and halve the ground beef and cheese.
Mark Bittman wrote a PB&J Campaign-esque piece for yesterday’s New York Times instructing people on how to take just this approach. The gist of the article is that people can be quite satisfied by eating meat as a condiment or a small treat, for example to think of a stew as a dish of vegetables with a little meat for flavor. (Bittman also wrote a blog post on Dutch anti-meat activists Niko Koffeman and Antoinette Hertsenberg. Niko put together a nifty table on the environmental impact of foregoing meat – a very PB&J Campaign thing to do.)
This discussion raises a question for the PB&J Campaign: what exactly do we mean when we say “plant-based?” We’re still fiddling with the pledge form, but on it we’re giving people targets of “plant-based” meals to eat. The examples we use are animal-product-free dishes like PB&Js, what if there’s a little chicken stock in the black bean soup, or what if you sprinkle a little cheese on the pasta? How about a dab of sour cream in the bean burrito? Does that minimal quantity of animal product make much of an environmental impact?
Let’s take water as an example. Based on the tables on the FAO’s Water Footprint site, each gram of cheese takes about a gallon of water to produce, and the serving size on the container of grated romano cheese in my refrigerator is five grams (two teaspoons), or five gallons. So, if you’ve decided to have a nice white bean and pasta stew for dinner, you’re cutting your water savings from the average of about 152 gallons of water to about 147 gallons. That’s still a decent impact, and if those two teaspoons of cheese enable you to forgo something like a steak or half a chicken, then it’s hard to argue with it.
Of course you could also dump the grated cheese on there with reckless abandon and make it a major part of the meal, but assuming that the animal products in the dish are there in really small quantities, you’re still making a difference compared to the average American meal.
Recently we’ve been corresponding with a student from a middle school in Revere, Massachusetts. Her teacher is running a little competition to see which of his classes can make the biggest impact by eating plant-based meals. I should be careful about using the word ‘competition,’ since the student herself has made clear that they’re all winners as they learn about how to reduce their impact (cut carbon emissions, save water, conserve land) on our planet. They’ve been working on it for about a week, and so far they’re in the low hundreds of meals. We’ll report back on this as we get more updates from Revere.
The idea of group PB&J competitions seems really obvious now that our middle school environmentalist has reported it, but I can’t say any of us had thought of it. We’ve thought of people coming together to set group targets, and we’ve done an individual competition as a fundraiser (Bernard Brown vs. Jim Mitre - we were both winners :-), but maybe this is something we can promote as a good hook for people to get involved.
We also haven’t advanced the idea of the PB&J Campaign as an environmental education tool for children. Our target audience has been adults who already have an interest in helping the environment - the people who’ve put in some fluorescent light bulbs, the recyclers. Still, following on the Good Housekeeping article (the writer learned about the PB&J Campaign from her daughter, who heard about it from her teacher), it looks like we’ve got the makings of a trend there, something worth some more attention once we (finally) do the launch.
We had a pleasant surprise in Good Housekeeping this month. In a sidebar (p. 101) in an article on a family’s effort to go green and reduce their environmental footprint, they suggest eating lower on the food chain and cite our statistics on how easy it is to reduce carbon emissions and water consumption one meal at a time.
In other news, we read about an interesting article looking at the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from different food categories. When they compare the emissions per calorie, the animal products come out way more carbon intensive than the grains (no big surprise) but the fish, poultry, and eggs came out less carbon intensive than fruits and vegetables. That was a little surprising until I thought about how lettuce and carrots are a lot less calorie-dense than eggs and just about everything else. The bigger message of the article was that transportation plays a relatively small part in food GHG emissions. So if you want to cut the GHG emissions from what you eat, cutting back on animal products will make a bigger impact than eating local (of course doing both can be even better).
Stay tuned for the new PB&J Pledge function (and the launch!). The developer sent us the first draft of the form and its backing database and we only had a few minor changes to request, so we should have it up and running before too long.
On Earthday, April 22nd, Sodexo featured the PB&J Campaign’s message as part of their Earthday programming. They worked the PB&J theme into menus at dining halls on several campuses across the Southeast. It looks like a success, with around six tons of CO2-equivalent emissions saved, more than six hundred thousand gallons of water saved, and more than two and a half acres of land saved.
Sodexo’s Earthday also included a focus on reducing waste and on sourcing local ingredients. Eating one meal at a time lower on the food chain is one of several things we can do to shrink our carbon footprint and save water, land, pollution, and biodiversity. The PB&J Campaign focuses on reducing environmental destruction by eating plant-based meals, and we’re happy to see our message presented as part of a comprehensive approach with more-mainstream actions.
The Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production just put out a report on… guess what, industrial farm animal production. The Commission, a joint project with Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health (home also of Meatless Monday) doesn’t reveal any new scandals or dire statistics about how we produce most of our animal products in Putting Meat on the Table; it presents a lot of familiar scandals and dire statistics by pulling together research from other sources on the public health, environmental, animal welfare, and rural social/economic effects of industrial animal farming. If you’re looking for a quick (about 120 pages, but easily to skim) introduction to the topic, it’s a good place to start.
The PB&J Campaign fights the environmental destruction caused by animal product production, and the report offers us a good opportunity to mention some of the more-local effects we don’t talk about as much. The PB&J Campaign focuses on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, conserving water, and saving land in our outreach, but as the Pew report makes clear, industrial animal production facilities (a.k.a. factory farms, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations - CAFOs) can have devastating local effects: the hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and other gases released from the tanks and lagoons of urine and manure make the neighbors sick; that waste (including the antibiotics and arsenic-based antimicrobials passed through the animals) seeps into aquifers and washes into waterways causing horrible water pollution.
I was a little unhappy about the Commission recommendations. I can’t disagree with most of them, but I think they didn’t go far enough. I wish they had recommended a reduction in animal production. Of course if every regulatory measure they recommend were taken we’d have healthier rural communities and less-miserable ‘farm’ animals, but we’d still be wasting incredible amounts of land and water and producing large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. I think there’s a certain timidity from lots of critics of our agricultural system - they’ll optimistically recommend changes to its form, but they’re afraid to say there’s a problem with its scale.
Although the PB&J Campaign attacks the problems addressed by the Pew report, it doesn’t directly attack the local environmental effects or even promote the welfare of the animals left in a smaller system. Fewer CAFOs would mean fewer communities with water and air pollution problems (a very good thing), but the remaining CAFOs could have the same effects on their neighbors.
That said, it’s easier to be picky about where your meat, eggs, cheese, etc. come from if you’re eating less of them. If you eat half the eggs you used to eat, it’s easier to stomach spending a little more per egg to get the local eggs from pasture-raised hens at the local farmer’s market (my experience being a case in point). Wild-caught salmon from well managed fisheries might be really expensive, but if you’re eating it as an infrequent treat, then it might be worth the money.
Ultimately the best outcome is one in which we all eat more plant-based meals and buy the animal products we do buy from the most sustainable, animal-friendly, and community-friendly sources we can. I wish the Pew Commission had recommended that.
To end on an up note, I’ll throw in a link to the Meatrix. It basically covers the same ground as the Pew Commission report but in a short, funny cartoon.
About a year and a half ago I read Diet for a Small Planet. By that point I was hard at work on the PB&J Campaign’s first website and all the calculations that went into it, and some friends of mine were shocked I hadn’t yet read Frances Moore Lappe’s book on how our food system creates food scarcity and how to take action by eating lower on the food chain. I found myself agreeing on the whole with the book, but with its focus on poverty and food scarcity I thought of it as tangential to the PB&J Campaign, which has a tighter focus on the environmental impact - global climate change, water use and pollution, over-fishing, deforestation, etc.
Now that we’re seeing a lot more food shortages around the world and prices actually rise in the United States, I’m starting to take Diet for a Small Planet a little more seriously. The current food scarcity problems do have a major cause in common with the environmental problems we fight with the PB&J Campaign - we’re wasting a whole lot of grain by feeding it to livestock, and people in other countries are doing the same. We discuss why this is a waste here in more detail, but the gist of it is that when we ask animals to convert plant matter to meat, eggs, and milk, they don’t do it very efficiently, so that we could gain more calories (or protein, fat, almost any nutrient you can think of) eating the feed directly. In some cases we can’t eat the feed directly (timothy hay anyone?), but we could use the land and other resources to grow more food than we get out of the livestock intermediaries, and we’d conserve water, save land, and cut greenhouse gas emissions in the process.
Although a lot of people are pointing fingers at the biofuels boom as the cause of the current food shortages, biofuels are not responsible for the majority of the increase in demand for food commodities - I keep hearing 20% tossed around as their share. Increasing fossil fuel costs play a big part (as well as the drop in the value of the dollar for the USA), but another big culprit is the increase in demand for animal products in increasingly wealthy India and China.
Of course a lot of undernourished people might be adding a little meat or eggs to their diets and it’s hard to begrudge them that, but a lot of middle-class people are also starting to follow the USA’s luxury-level consumption patterns with very bad consequences for global warming, water supplies, and deforestation.
In a world of global commodity markets where soy and corn are shipped across the globe, we have a chance to relieve some of the pressure on food supplies and on the environment by changing at least a few of our meals. Americans already eat more animal products than people in most developed countries, so we’ve got room to cut back (for that matter so do people in those other developed countries too). We’ve also got to start thinking about how we can address our message of greening our diets and reducing our footprints to developing countries. How about a tofu campaign? A dal campaign?
We caught wind of an interesting television moment involving Cornell West, Bill Maher, and PB&J. Apparently they were discussing how animal product consumption exacerbates food shortages, and Dr. West mention that although he does eat meat, he often has too little time to prepare anything but a PB&J. Bill replied that a PB&J is probably better for the environment. See the exchange here on You Tube. I’m not sure if Bill Maher already knows about the PB&J Campaign or is just into our mission without knowing it, but it’s a cool coincidence if nothing else, and maybe an opportunity.
The Sodexo Earth Day event looks like a big success in spreading awareness on campuses about how eating plant-based meals can help the environment, fighting global warming and conserving water and land. Check out some of the on-site materials in the picture in this article from UNC Pembroke. Here’s some more coverage from The State in South Carolina and Palm Beach Atlantic University’s website.
We’ll keep posting about coverage of the Earth Day event here.
It’s Earth Day! It’s been fun to see all the Green Issues of magazines and specials on TV, especially now that we see this kind of coverage throughout the year. It’s not just an isolated blip of media attention, but a bump in an otherwise upwards trend.
Although we don’t have any parties planned, Sodexo will be doing a PB&J Day at many of their Southeast campuses, and we’re excited to see if they can duplicate (multiply?) the event at Belmont College a few weeks ago that inspired the broader effort. Please look for a report back on the event later this week.
You might also notice the new blog format. There’s still some tweaking left to do, but this will be the main blog address and the main blog format (with minor modifications) going forward. It’s a little sad to say goodbye to the sandwich halo logo, but we might work that into PB&J Campaign merchandise as soon as we get around to producing some.
Welcome to the new Blog! As you can tell by this enormous post, I had some trouble importing the posts from the old blog (one of many reasons we’re in the process of switching hosts), so they’re all here in one long post. It is nowhere near perfect, but if you are interested in an old topic you can search back.
I woke up to an encouraging interview on NPR’s Morning Edition. Roz Naylor, a professor at Stanford was talking about the negative
environmental impact of our livestock industry. It’s old hat to PB&J
Campaign readers, but it sure was exciting to hear the message presented so
directly on a major national news program. I wrote an email to NPR thanking
them for the story and telling them about how the PB&J Campaign is helping
people fight the environmental problems caused by animal agriculture one meal
at a time. If you’ve got a free moment, please do the same, and if you’re
feeling so moved don’t stop there. We can use all the letters to editors that
we can write; the more media outlets that run stories like the one on Morning
Edition today, the better.
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TITLE: The New Website
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 4/15/2008 1:31:00 AM
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The new website is up! We’ve still got some missing pieces (the Pledge section, and we’ll be nesting the blog into the home page), but these should fall into place pretty soon. We’ll do the full roll out once all that’s done, but it’s feeling pretty good to see it all in place.
In other news, the plans for Earth Day (April 22nd) working with Sodexo are moving along fast. It’s a lot to plan in a short period of time, but it’s a fun experiment that could be pretty amazing if it works out. We’re going to try (operative word ‘try’) to get in touch with environmental groups at the 80 or so campuses involved and coordinate, so if you’re at a college in the Southeast where Sodexo manages the dining services, please drop us an email.
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TITLE: A PB&J Day
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DATE: 4/4/2008 10:58:00 AM
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Lately things have been feeling quiet at the PB&J
Campaign. I’ve been working on programming the new website (going pretty well
so far; I hope to post some test versions next week).
Although it’s important work, it doesn’t feel very exciting while you’re doing it,
so I was excited to see an email about a fabulously successful PB&J Day at Belmont College in Tennessee.
The message came from a Sustainability Coordinator with Sodexo (a food services
company) at Belmont,
where at one meal they saved half a ton of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas
emissions, about 84,000 gallons of water, and about 4,500 square feet of land!
Better yet, the success has inspired Sodexo to try out a
PB&J Day on April 22nd at Sodexo Campus Services dining
facilities all across the Southeast. If you’re a student at one of these
campuses, we’d be delighted to hear about how the day goes.
In other news, Beth flagged an interesting article
from the New York Times a few days ago about how energy cost increases and the
rise in costs in commodity crops like corn and soy have made industrial
agricultural products more expensive. Prices are rising for products from
factory-farm-raised animals that eat corn and soy diets as well as for
industrial ingredients such as corn syrup.
The commodity prices are going up in part because of the
energy cost increases (which affect everything from the cost of fuel to run
equipment and for transportation to the price of fossil fuel-derived pesticides
and fertilizer) and in part because of increasing demand. The increased demand
comes from the biofuel industries (for ethanol and biodiesel) and for animal
product production, which is increasing in developing countries such as China and India.
Sustainable animal producers and their advocates, such as
Michael Pollan, point out that making industrial agricultural products more
expensive might make organic and pastured products more attractive to
consumers. People who weren’t keen on spending extra for organic and local food
might be willing now that it’s comparatively cheaper.
We’re all for eating the more sustainably and humanely
produced products when possible (local, organic, pastured, etc.), but this
whole question of how price influences eating choices reminds me of one of the
great things the PB&J Campaign has going for it – eating plant-based food
is cheap! Even if you can’t afford to eat local and organic all the time, that
PB&J or bean burrito is still probably less expensive than the hamburger
that takes about 17 times as much water and 19 times as much land to produce.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: Green College Students and Musicians who Love PB&Js
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 3/13/2008 12:50:00 AM
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We’ve been working on the new website; the design has been
set (many thanks again to DFSI for their fine work) and now it’s time to start
programming. We’re thinking about switching web hosts for a variety of reasons,
including to allow for more possibilities with working the blog directly into
the website.
In the meantime we’ve been contacted by some interesting folks.
First off is Green Student U, a really an environmental blog geared towards college students. It’s
chock full of good information but is also a really elegant looking site (Can you
tell we’ve been thinking a lot about website aesthetics lately?).
The next is in a whole new category – musicians who are into
PB&Js. Ian Axel is a singer/songwriter who apparently REALLY likes
PB&Js. We can dig that. Check out his music on his website and his own demonstration of how to make a PB&J.
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DATE: 2/27/2008 11:24:00 AM
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We’ve been working with the web designers at DFSI to iron out the last
details of how the new website will look. It’s exciting even if we don’t quite
have the money yet to program the site (please don’t hesitate to donate).
In the meantime I’ve been keeping an eye out for interesting
articles related to our mission of fighting environmental destruction by convincing
people to eat less of animal products.
One comparing the emissions from driving to those from eating animal products caught my eye. It reminded me of an odd webpage I saw over a year ago that made
the theoretical case that bicycling produces more GHG emissions than driving if
you eat beef to provide the calories needed to ride. The idea is that the GHG
emissions from the production of the calories of beef you’d use in cycling a
given distance exceed the GHG emissions produced from burning the gasoline to
drive the car that same distance. I can’t find that site anymore, but this post on a NY Times online blog
raises a similar question
– if you give up driving and burn more calories by walking around or driving
(or taking a pedal-rickshaw), you actually produce more GHG emissions if you
make up those extra calories with animal products.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: Packaging
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 2/20/2008 11:54:00 AM
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The PB&J Campaign is about reducing the environmental
footprint of our diets by eating more plant-based meals and less animal-product
food. We’ll keep that the core of the Campaign, but we’ve always got time to
touch on other dimensions of the sustainability of our food systems.
More than one person who’s written to the PB&J Campaign
has asked that we talk about packaging for food, so here goes: the less
packaging for your food the better. This is nearly as simple as our message of
eating lower on the food chain. Food is no different in this than shoes,
electronics, or toothpaste. Paper, plastic, and metal all take lots of energy
(=coal, petroleum, natural gas, greenhouse gas emissions) and water in addition
to the materials themselves – all the petroleum or natural gas (for plastics),
metal, and wood. The numbers can be a little shocking, even for callous
environmentalists who’ve already heard it all. I was impressed by an elegant
statistic for bottled water – that it takes more than six times as much water to make the bottle than is contained in the bottle (at least for those little
half-liter bottles we tend to buy).
So what about lunch? If you pack your lunch, it’s about as
simple as taking a reusable container. The water and energy for washing it will
still generally be less than what it takes to produce disposable packaging.
It’s a little harder when you buy lunch. It can be a little concerning
(embarrassing?) to finish the falafel sandwich and consider the ball of foil
and plastic left at the end. Of course you should still eat lower on the food
chain when ordering takeout (all else being equal, including packaging, plant
ingredients are generally lower-impact than animal ingredients), but try
sitting down and eating at the restaurant. As someone who tends to eat lunch in
front of the computer, this is something I know I’m still working on, but each
time we skip the packaging, we make the world a little better.
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TITLE: About.PB&J Campaign
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 2/14/2008 1:01:00 PM
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Here’s a great article (http://environment.about.com/od/greenlivinginthekitchen/a/peanut_butter.htm) about the PB&J Campaign and eating plant-based meals to help the environment. We work hard to condense the argument onto a website meant to introduce the concept, but if we were to write it out into a longer article, it would look a lot like this.
Also, here’s an article on (www.panda.org/bycatch) reducing bycatch on the WWF’s (www.panda.org) website (another article we picked up from www.enn.com). Of course until the people and companies that produce seafood (remember these are largely big, industrial fishing operations we’re talking about) eliminate bycatch, we can take a bite out of the problem with a PB&J or other plant-based meal.
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TITLE: Articles on Environmental Effects of Agriculture and What You Can Do
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DATE: 2/6/2008 1:22:00 PM
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We’ve been reading the Environmental News Network’s website lately, and we might
start making a habit of posting links to articles that have to do with the
environmental effects of what we eat. The PB&J Campaign works hard to keep
a light, fun tone, but it’s also important to ground the Campaign in the serious problems we’re fighting one meal at a time.
Ultimately we’re working to reduce demand for animal
products and all of their upstream inputs (feed, water, land, fuel, fertilizer
and pesticides for feed crops) and thus shrink the footprint of our agriculture
industry. It works like this – each time you choose a plant-based meal it means
you’re buying a little less of animal products, the supermarket orders a little
less from their suppliers or the restaurant orders a little less from
their suppliers. They order less from their wholesalers, prices drop a little
for the ranchers, farmers, and seafood producers, and they produce less. Less
livestock means less pollution from animal waste and enteric fermentation
(those famous cow farts). Less fuel gets used to run fishing boats and machinery;
less land, water, fertilizer, and pesticides get used for feed crops.
We all contribute a little of the demand that ultimately
shapes the decisions of the producers all the way up the supply chains. We
can’t change things completely all on our own, but we can do our part. Here’s a report from Greenpeace that goes into agriculture’s impact on global warming in
more detail. I’ve only had the time to read the executive summary so far, but
it looks like the report advocates cutting back on animal product consumption
as an important way to reduce the global warming impact of agriculture.
So with that introduction (a little longer than I had been
thinking), here are some articles about what we’re fighting. Let’s start with Brazil.The big
reasons the Amazon and the lesser-known Cerrado (Brazil’s savannah, pronounced
see-ha-dju) are being cut down and bulldozed right now are ranching and soy
production (also discussed in that Greenpeace report). A lot of the increased
production is driven by demand for biodiesel (an important way the biofuel
craze is backfiring), but the other big demand driving it is for feed for
livestock. It’s important to mention that Brazilian soy is mostly destined for
Europe and Asia - our livestock is mostly fed with domestic soy - but
with global commodities like soy it’s the overall high commodity
prices that matter – high prices for US soy for export motivates farmers
in other countries to get in the game.
We’ve discussed
how fishing requires lots of fuel and thus produces lots of greenhouse gas
emissions (and how the aquaculture industry has many of the same problems as
the livestock industry). Here’s an article about problems with blue fin
tuna and how we’re fishing one of the most beautiful predators of the sea to
near-extinction.
It can all be a little depressing, but we hope you don’t
throw in the dishtowel. You can do something, and all it takes is eating more
plant-based meals. You don’t have to change everything you eat, but you can
make an impact one meal at a time.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: PB&J Vs. Water Pollution
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 2/2/2008 1:09:00 AM
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A little over a week ago we finally wrapped up our latest slide show/video by our spokes-sandwiches, PB&J Girl and PB&J Boy. We’ve posted it to Youtube, so please check it out and tell all your friends.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: “Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler”
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 1/28/2008 3:40:00 AM
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We got quite a treat this morning in the NY Times’ Week In
Review: “Rethinking the Meat Grinder,” a front-page article by Mark Bittman
about the negative effects – primarily environmental but also animal welfare –
of our level of animal products consumption.
It’s a great morale boost to see our mission – reducing
animal product consumption for positive environmental impact – espoused by an
article on the front page of the Week in Review Section of the New York Times, but
I do wish Mr. Bittman had made a stronger point of urging consumers to change
eating habits, but we can do that and should.
I just wrote a letter to the editor of the NY Times to make
the point of what individual consumers can do to fight animal-product-related
environmental. Please join me.
Please also keep an eye open for articles about
environmental effects of food production or ways to green your diet. There are
a lot websites and newspapers out there, and we can’t keep track of them all on
our own. We need all your help to find out what’s being written out there, and
we need all your help to let editorial boards and website editors know how
people can change the world one meal at a time. Please let us know whenever you
see something we should know about, and please don’t hesitate to write letters
to editors about the PB&J Campaign.
In the spirit of the web outreach we undertook when we
launched the website, I’d like to thank The Healthy Vegan Blog
for posting about the PB&J Campaign and posting a link. Although the
PB&J Campaign is focused on the meal-level impact of how we can change our
diet rather than whole-life changes, the site looks like a great source for
recipes and meal ideas for changing the world one meal at a time.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: Planet Green and GirlieGirl Army
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 1/19/2008 9:28:00 PM
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The fun media coverage keeps on rolling, even though we’re still not doing much active outreach. We’ll take it, though, and here’s one that was a total surprise. I was reading one of my favorite environmental news sites, www.Treehugger.com and I followed a link to a new site by the same people called Planetgreen. Right there on the food and health section, posted that very day, was a lovely article about the PB.
In other coverage, a friend let us know we made it onto an interesting best of 2007 list - this time in a newsletter by Chloejoe, who does the GirlieGirl Army, Your Guide to Glamazon Living. I can’t say I completely understand the newsletter or everything Chloejoe does, but it seems like we’re getting some exposure to some audiences that might not have sat down expecting to read about the environment, and I’m all for it.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: Michael Pollan: Eat Mostly Plants
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 1/16/2008 1:30:00 PM
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I’ve been a big fan of Michael Pollan for a while, so I was excited to see this line from the cover of his new book, In Defense of Food, “Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants.” I haven’t had a chance to read the new book, but I did read an article based on the book in the New York Times Magazine a few months ago so I think I get the gist of it.
The argument is mostly about how what we eat affects our health, and the tag line addresses how to eat for individual health. The PB&J Campaign focuses on eating for the planet’s health, but it’s still fun to see a broad recommendation for healthful eating fit our own recommendations, especially that last part about eating mostly plants.
Of course the argument also precludes eating much highly processed foods, so the PB&J you end up with might use natural peanut butter and fresh fruit, but of course there is a world of plant-based meals out there beyond the glorious PB&J - just about any bean stew or soup, falafel, tofu dishes, and so on.
If you like In Defense of Food, check out some of Pollan’s other books that focus more on how diet and agriculture impact the planet such as Omnivore’s Dilemma and Second Nature.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: PB&J Campaign in the NY Times
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 1/10/2008 2:04:00 PM
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About a week and a half ago a friend emailed me that the PB&J Campaign had been covered in the Sierra Club’s magazine. She’s saved it for me, but I still haven’t gotten over there to pick it up. In the meantime, though, a blog in the New York Times online Health section mentioned the Sierra Club’s coverage of the PB&J Campaign and included a paragraph with our basic stats.
I do like their caption on the sandwich photo: “Greener than a Burger,” which really does get to the heart of what we’re trying to get across (greener than a grilled cheese, tuna sandwich, pork chop, etc.). If you’re checking out the PB&J Campaign for the first time as a result of the article, please enjoy the site, check out our Myspaceand Facebook groups as well, and maybe take a couple minutes to meet our spokes-sandwiches.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: Soup and the PB&J Campaign
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 12/30/2007 11:36:00 PM
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Winter seems to have arrived in Philadelphia. I say ‘seems’ because we
haven’t had much ice and snow yet, just lots of wet, gray, chilly weather.
Whether we’re trudging through snow or cold rain, however, soup really hits the
spot.
We worry that the PB&J Campaign is being taken a little
too literally. Media reports seem to focus exclusively on the PB&J to the
exclusion of the broader message about eating lower on the food chain, and blog
comments and emails have done much the same. We’ve been discussing this and
although we will stick with our focus on America’s greatest sandwich as our
hook and to get our point across, we’ll take every chance we get to point out
other great foods that have similar positive environmental impacts.
Today, as I write this, we’re cooking a rich white bean and
pasta soup for dinner. Last week I whipped up a hearty, traditional lentil soup
for a friend who was under the weather (and of course made a little extra for myself),
and I brought it over with a salad and a crusty loaf of bread. These are meals
that are about as low on the food chain as you can go, and they’re miles away
from a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. They might not pack as well for lunch,
but they make a warming, nourishing dinner on a cold winter night.
So if you’re skeptical about your ability to stick to a
regular diet of PB&Js, concerned about allergies, or just want to change
the world at dinner, don’t worry. There are plenty of other ways out there to
make a difference one meal at a time.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: Low Carbon Diet Initiative
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 12/14/2007 12:48:00 AM
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At the risk of geeking out a bit on the blog, I want to
write about a great research program I just learned about – the Agricultural Sustainability Instituteat U.C. Davis. I say ‘great’ because they’re
working on just the sort of project I think is needed for analyzing lifecycle
emissions from different types of food. They’re calling the project “The
Low Carbon Diet Initiative” and you can read more about it here.
The PB&J Campaign has been using what we think is the
best information out there to date – the work of Eshel and Martin – for working out the
meal-level greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions saved in changing one meal at a time,
but there are some problems with the Eshel and Martin data (primarily that they based their numbers on a relatively old analysis by Pimentel and Pimentel of energy use in agriculture),
and we’d love to have more numbers calculated in different ways to work with, similar to what we’ve got for the water statistics.
If you’d like to indulge in some more research on the topic,
check out their literature review.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: The End of the Challenge
STATUS: Published
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
ALLOW PINGS: 1
DATE: 12/10/2007 12:05:00 PM
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Jim concluded his PB&J Challenge a few days ago after a solid eight days of nothing but PB&J sandwiches. I am tempted to declare victory, but Jim went a little further than I did and eschewed even fruits and vegetables; he ate absolutely nothing but PB&Js. By the end he was feeling a bit under the weather - weak and a little digestively uncomfortable. I fault the lack of fruits and veggies, and as great as any food is for a lunch a few times a week, there probably isn’t much we should eat exclusively. I think it also might underline the basic meal-level concept of the PB&J Campaign, that one can approach each meal as its own opportunity to help the environment.
In the end it looks like Jim also raised over $200, and of course inspired me to do my own PB&J Challenge. This will all be a huge help as we start the new website in earnest.
Bernard S. Brown
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: Jim is a PB&J Star
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 12/3/2007 1:57:00 AM
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Jim Mitre, originator of the PB&J Challenge, is in the midst of the PB&J Challenge himself. He had to delay his by a few weeks due to travel for work, but he’s in the middle of it now, and it sounds like he’s rocking out and on track to raise a couple hundred dollars for the PB&J Campaign. That might not sound like much, but it should put us over the top for getting started on our web overhaul project.
On that front, I had a meeting with Alex from Design for Social Impact, the firm we’re using for the website. It understates things somewhat to just refer to this as a website overhaul. DFSI does more than just websites, they are experts at the the nonprofit advocacy campaign, and since the PB&J Campaign is a web-based effort, overhauling the site will mean a serious look at overall strategy, tone, and message as well as how to perfect our primary vehicle for spreading the word about how to change the world one lunch at a time. I’m excited to finally get started, so please check back in for updates.
It’s not too late to support the PB&J Campaign, so feel free to donate now and do it again whenever the feeling moves you.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: New YouTube Video
STATUS: Published
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
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DATE: 11/25/2007 4:51:00 PM
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A few weeks ago we took a bunch of photos of PB&J Girl and PB&J Boy, and I’d been procrastinating ever since about putting them together into another slide show/movie. Then I noticed another You Tube presidential candidate debate, this time for the Republican primary candidates. The idea is that people submit questions they’d like to ask the candidates, and they’ll answer the questions on CNN. I though ‘wouldn’t it be nifty for PB&J Girl and PB&J Boy to ask a question.’ It does tiptoe away a little bit from our focus on public awareness, but seeing that over four thousand questions have been submitted so far, I think it’s safe to assume ours won’t be selected for the debate. So, it will probably end up serving as simply a great public awareness gimmick for the Campaign, and we’re happy with that.
So, I slapped a piece together and tried to post it. It was too long, so I re-edited and posted it again. You can check out both versions here at our You Tube site:www.youtube.com/profile?user=PBJCampaign
In other news, I talked to Jim Mitre this morning, and he’s gearing up for his Challenge. He’s sure he can beat my 52 sandwich mark for two weeks, and I’m betting on him too. I’ll keep you updated as he slogs on through the test of endurance that is the PB&J Challenge.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: My Challenge is Over! (and KGO story)
STATUS: Published
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
ALLOW PINGS: 1
DATE: 11/17/2007 1:10:00 PM
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This morning I had a bowl of cereal (with soy milk, so still quite low on the food chain) for the first time in two weeks, and it was delicious.
Last night I wrapped up my 14th day of eating PB&Js. For the last meal I grilled a couple spicy PB&J sandwiches and accompanied them with an apple and a persimmon.
Judging by the pledges, I’ve raised a little over $200, and I’m hoping my fellow Challenge competitors have raised or will raise a good bit more. Jim had to postpone his Challenge, but he should start next week, and he claims he can out-eat me and he can bring in more money to go towards the website.
Also last night we had a story about the PB&J Campaign run on the local ABC affiliate in San Francisco. Check it out here.
I’d like to thank Wayne Freedman for thinking of the story and producing it, although I do wish he’d ordered something else for lunch. We’ll see what he gets tomorrow.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: PB&J Challenge on WHYY
STATUS: Published
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
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DATE: 11/15/2007 12:36:00 PM
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We thought up the PB&J Challenge as a fundraiser, but it’s turned into a nice PR hook as well. Michael of Four Worlds Bakery (just to be clear, there is no paid endorsement here and I’ve been buying all the bread I’ve been eating) mentioned the PB&J Campaign and the Challenge in his weekly email to his customers, and one of those customers turned out to be a public radio producer. We talked on Monday, and he’ll be trying to get a story run on a nationally-syndicated public radio show. In the meantime, he had a story run as a news feature last night on WHYY, Philadelphia’s main NPR station. I can’t find a link to stream or download the story, but as soon we’ve got one, I’ll post it here.
If you’d like to support the PB&J Challenge send an email to pbj@pbjcampaign.org, or feel free to make a straight-up donation.
Bon Appetite
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: Party PB&Js
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 11/13/2007 3:12:00 AM
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I’m still trucking along through the PB&J Challenge. The latest interesting PB&J situation was a party on Saturday. I brought five PB&Js of five different jelly, pb, and fruit combinations, all cut into quarters. I ate eight of the quarters, and the rest disappeared by about halfway through the party. Who knew PB&J sandwiches would be such great party food? Also, nothing works as a conversation starter like “I’m on a strict PB&J diet.”
It’s still not too late to pledge to support me in my shot at the PB&J Challenge. Email pbj@pbjcampaign.org or make a straight donation. Also, now that Jim will be taking the challenge in a couple weeks, we’ve decided to make this an open ended thing - if you and some friends would like to do your own little PB&J Challenge, just let us know and we’ll get you set up.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: PB&J Challenge, Halfway
STATUS: Published
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
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DATE: 11/10/2007 2:26:00 PM
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One week down, one to go. I’ve settled into a solid groove with the Challenge, and this is actually turning out to be pretty easy. The one big hitch so far has been that I ran out of bread from Four Worlds Bakery (my friend Michael’s operation) Thursday night. All three loaves were great - the multigrain a little better for the savory PB&Js, the cranberry/sunflower amazing for the sweet, and the whole wheat challah kicked ass for everything. I picked up more last night, so I’m back on track - this time a loaf of whole wheat, a loaf of anadama (wheat and corn), and another of whole wheat challah.
Jim has had to postpone his Challenge due to some travel and a work retreat that are making it hard for him to make his own food, so now for me it’s a question of staying as close to 100% as possible and setting a tough standard for Jim to beat in a couple weeks. So far I’ve only fallen off the PB&J wagon for a dinner with my grandmother, and I might have to do it again tomorrow for dinner out with my other grandmother, but otherwise I’m in good shape to stick with 4 PB&Js per day for another week. I don’t think I’ll keep on posting each sandwich I eat, but I’ll mention the highlights.
On Thursday morning I ran into a minor challenge with the end of the challah. For those not familiar with a loaf of challah, it’s a braided bread roughly oval in footprint. So, the end is too narrow for a proper sandwich. I decided to take four or five very thin slices, though, and stack them in offset layers. It was one of the best PB&Js ever - the jelly, peanut butter, and thin slivers of bread sort of melded together in the middle by the time I ate it for lunch at work.
It’s not too late to pledge to support the Challenge (just email me at pbj@pbjcampaign.org) or to make a donation to the Campaign. If you’d like to do your own PB&J Challenge, perhaps on a campus or with a group of friends, let us know and we’ll get you set up.
Bon appetite
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TITLE: Two more Days of the Challenge!
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 11/7/2007 1:26:00 AM
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On NPR yesterday morning they had a piece about umami. Umami is the fifth of the basic tastes - salt, sour, sweet, bitter, and umami. It’s the taste of savory - the full, rich flavor of lots of animal products, mushrooms, and soysauce. I bring it up because the rest of the day yesterday as I thought about the the umami story, I felt a growing craving for something savory. PB&J sandwiches are great, but savory they are not.
But why not? Could a PB&J be not so sweet and hit the umami spot and still be a PB&J? Peanut butter and peanuts are in all kinds of savory dishes in SE Asia, Africa, and South America (think of peanut soups and groundnut stews). So, as soon as I got home (after eating 1 sandwich’s worth of leftover PB&J fragments from the Sunday photo shoot for breakfast, and a whole wheat challah PB&J with strawberry jelly for lunch) I threw some peanuts in the blender with a little oil and salt (= peanut butter) with some sauteed onions and a little Thai green chili paste. It tasted great, so I slapped it on some multigrain bread and spread a very thin layer of strawberry jelly (to keep it a true PB&J). For my second dinner sandwich I used the cranberry/sunflower seed bread with blueberry jelly and some cinnamon raisin peanut butter that I ground up over the weekend. To keep this healthy, I had a persimmon, an apple, some cherry tomatoes, and a really good yellow bell pepper with all those sandwiches.
I followed the same basic pattern today. I had a cranberry/sunflower seed, cinnamon raisin pb, and apricot jelly sandwich for breakfast along with a persimmon. I had another bell pepper and apple at lunch with my whole wheat challah PB&J with strawberry, and for dinner I had basically the same thing as last night, but this time I lightly pan fried each.
This is all a little harder than I had thought, but I’m adapting and having a good time.
Think I can keep this up? It’s not too late to pledge to support the PB&J Challenge - just write to pbj@pbjcampaign.org to sign up.
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TITLE: Two Days of the Challenge
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DATE: 11/5/2007 1:22:00 AM
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Two days down for the Challenge:
On day one (November 3rd), I only had two PB&Js. We had longstanding plans with my parents and grandmother. So, although I had a PB&J for breakfast (along with a persimmon) and one for lunch (with some cherry tomatoes and an apple), dinner was fated to be Italian.
Today was day two, and it got a little complicated. We did a photo shoot for the next PB&J Girl and PB&J Boy, which meant making a bunch of sandwiches (seven) and using cookie cutters to cut out the boy and girl shapes, along with a frog, turtle, fish, cow, chick, and pig. I was left with seven remnants of sandwiches. Over the course of the day I’ve eaten five, along with the chick, the turtle, and the frog. That about equals about four complete sandwiches by my estimation. I’ve also eaten a couple green peppers, an apple, a handful of cherry tomatoes, and a persimmon.
So far I’ve used strawberry and blueberry jelly. I’ve tried two types of peanut butter. One is the standard creamy, but the other a hot/chili pepper peanut butter. It goes well with some cranberry-sunflower seed bread I’ve been working with. I’ve decided to go local this week as well as going PB&J, and on Friday I bought three loaves of bread from a friend who is a baker in my neighborhood (challahmansbreadblog.blogspot.com/). I got a whole wheat challah (made with egg only as an egg wash, so nominal animal products), a multigrain levain (kind of a sourdough), and a cranberry-sunflower seed loaf. I did slip a little today, though, since the store-bought whole wheat holds together a little better when cut out PB&J Girl and Boy.
By the way, it’s not too late to chip in with your support for the PB&J Campaign, either as a direct donation or as a pledge (email pbj@pbjcampaign.org) per sandwich I’m eating for the PB&J Challenge.
Bon appetite
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TITLE: PB&J Challenge is On!
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 11/3/2007 12:39:00 PM
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This is it, guys. I’ve got an obscene amount of peanut butter (2 kinds), bread (4 kinds), and jelly (4 flavors) in my kitchen, and I intend to go through all of it in the next two weeks. I’ll be posting about my progress as I try to eat nothing but PB&Js for the next couple weeks and track the number I’m eating. We’ve got a couple other competitors at this point (Jim and Susan), so wish us luck, and get in touch if you want to pledge to support.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: The PB&J Challenge!
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 10/23/2007 12:26:00 PM
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Last week I was talking with Jim (an important PB&J
Campaign adviser), and he suggested he might see if he could get people to
pledge to give him money for each sandwich he ate and donate the money to the
PB&J Campaign. I thought that was a fabulous idea, and I decided I’d do the
same thing.
Then we got to talking some more about it, and we decided to
open this up to anyone who wants to take part in what we’re calling the
PB&J Challenge. I whipped up some instructions and documents we’ll need to
track multiple contestants, and now we’re ready to go.
We’ll be doing this over two weeks – from November 3rd
through the 16th. We’ll try to eat as many PB&Js over the two
weeks as we can, but to do it while eating normally, so figure on three or four
per day as the maximum. Another way of thinking of it is that the idea is to
replace as much of our normal diets with PB&Js as possible. This is more a
test of endurance than of stomach capacity.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, please do not
gorge yourself every day. The whole event makes sense only if we’re replacing
food (particularly animal-based food) we’d normally eat with PB&Js. I think
if I ate only PB&Js and fruits and veggies (my own plan), I’d be looking at
about four per day. Jim’s claiming five, maybe six, but he’s bigger than I
am.
Since this is a fundraiser, we’ll be asking friends and
family to pledge whatever they want per sandwich we eat, and we’ll ask them to
pick a maximum they’re willing to give, just in case they misjudge our capacity
to stick to a pure PB&J diet.
We’ll be tracking the dollars raised and the environmental
impact (another important reason not to gorge ourselves) of the sandwiches eaten as part of the PB&J Challenge.
At this point we haven’t thought of a prize for winning
(besides the immortality of fame and recognition on the Internet), but we’ll
think of something soon, maybe a kit so you can make your own PB&J Boy and
PB&J Girl.
If you’re interested, please send an email to pbj@pbjcampaign.org so we can send you
the full rules and the materials you’ll need.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: Mission and Message
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 10/17/2007 12:56:00 PM
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Lately we’ve been working on focusing the PB&J Campaign’s message and mission. At the heart of this process is the question, why are we doing this? What has motivated us to spend time, effort, and money encouraging people to change the world one lunch at a time?
From the beginning, the negative environmental impact of our food system has been the primary reason for the PB&J Campaign. A secondary concern was the welfare of animals in our food system. We presented the two concepts together with the idea that each might appeal to a different set of people, and that the two complemented each other. If someone is motivated to change a few meals a week to help animals, they’re also helping the environment.
As we’ve continued with the Campaign, however, the dual message has grown increasingly tricky to manage. The PB&J Campaign’s strength lies primarily in its focus on one simple concept and on one simple action. As we’ve discussed the next steps of the PB&J Campaign, we’ve realized that clarity is crucial and that we need to focus on the main reason we’re doing this: the environmental impact of what we eat.
To that end we’ve altered our mission statement and we’ve revised the website. We still mention the animal welfare benefits since we think some people still might find the idea compelling (http://www.pbjcampaign.org/nextsteps), but we’ve considerably deemphasized it.
We are aware that this shift in mission and message might upset some of our supporters, and we apologize for that. We hope they can still find fighting environmental destruction a sufficiently compelling reason to be involved with the PB&J Campaign.
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TITLE: More Videos on You Tube
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 10/16/2007 1:49:00 AM
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The donations are starting to come in! Thank you to everyone who’s donated so far. We’ve got a way to go still, but it’s immensely gratifying to have people trust us with their investments in the PB&J Campaign. You can make a donation by clicking here.
We’re having more fun with YouTube. We’ve added the other two slide shows to our YouTube account. These are older slide shows from back in the spring, but the first slide show we posted to You Tube has gotten a decent number of views, so it’s worth posting these too. It’s also a reminder that we need to get working on the next adventure of PB&J Girl and PB&J Boy.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: The PB&J Campaign Needs Money!
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 9/29/2007 12:30:00 AM
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The PB&J Campaign needs money. There’s no other way to
put it; we’ve got some exciting plans for the Campaign, but we need about
$3,500 to make the changes to the website, and then as much as we can get our
hands on to advertise to support the site. If you’ve got an extra few bucks
rattling around that you’re eager to spend on fighting global warming and
saving water and land, we’d love it if you’d donate it
to the PB&J Campaign.
As for PB&J Campaign news (quite literally), a piece about the Campaign just ran tonight on channel 6, the Philadelphia ABC
affiliate. It’s amazing how 45 minutes of taping can boil down to a minute and
a half, but it looks pretty good to us. Please let us know what you think.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: Fiscal Sponsorship
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 8/19/2007 2:58:00 AM
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We have wonderful news to report! The PB&J Campaign has been accepted as a program of Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs (SEE - www.saveourplanet.org). In nonprofit organization terms, SEE will be the PB&J Campaign’s fiscal sponsor.
Why does this matter? It all has to do with the capacity to expand our activities. The PB&J Campaign has been a great little project, but we haven’t been able to raise money. An organization has to be recognized as not-for-profit by the IRS in order to take charitable donations and apply for almost all grants, and without nonprofit status the PB&J Campaign has been unable to raise money to revise the website, add a calculator, advertise, etc.
The arrangement with SEE is that the PB&J Campaign will become a program of SEE and operate under its nonprofit status. So, as soon as we wrap up signing the papers, we can take donations and send off some of the grant application paperwork we’ve been working on.
Wish us luck.
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TITLE: Baseball and PB&J
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 8/8/2007 2:40:00 AM
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A few weeks ago we got an email from Buck Rogers. He was emailing from Space Coast Stadium. How would you react if you got an email from Buck Rogers from Space Coast Stadium? He said he was writing to offer to place a free ad in the game program for the Brevard County Manatees, a minor league baseball team in Florida. Much to our surprise, he turned out to be a real person, the general manager of a real team that plays in a stadium actually called Space Coast Stadium. So we sent him an ad, and they actually it in the program!
Go Manatees! As of tonight they’ve won five of their last six games, and we’re rooting for them against Tampa tomorrow night too.
We also had a story run on Environmental Report. This is an environmental radio program whose segments are syndicated around the country. I do wish I had shaved that morning and scrubbed a little harder to remove the reminder to pay the rent from my hand before the unexpected photo session.
Last, I’d like to mention that Rippin Skiers, a blog by Colorado skiers and snowboarders dedicated a post to the PB&J Campaign and posted a link. We’re delighted by the attention and the promotion, and if you’re out in Colorado or like to ski out there, check out their site.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: Video: How to Change the World at Lunch
STATUS: Published
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
ALLOW PINGS: 1
DATE: 7/28/2007 3:43:00 PM
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PB&J Girl and PB&J Boy just posted their new instructional video, “How to Change the World at Lunch.” You can check it out at the following websites:
Do you want to know how many grams per capita per day of garlic Italians
consume? (about 2 grams) We’re not so interested in the garlic statistics, but
the statistics for animal products have been quite useful in working out
averages for things that have been harder for us to pin down such as water
savings, numbers of animals spared, and discarded seafood by-catch.
Anyhow, check out One Billion Bulbs when you get a chance
and start putting in CFLs if you haven’t already. We’ll keep working on trying
to make our own calculator happen and keep you updated on how it goes.
Next up I think it might be time for another PB&J Girl
and PB&J Boy adventure. The slide show might not contribute substantially
to the success of the Campaign, but some lighthearted animation fun could be
just the antidote to the application doldrums.
One quick addition - we got a lovely recommendation on AnimalBlawg, an animal rights/animal law blog. If you’re an animal rights activist you’ll have observed that the PB&J Campaign works from a welfarist angle, but I’m heartened by people from all sides who agree on eating more PB&Js.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: Quiet Time at the PB&J Campaign
STATUS: Published
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
ALLOW PINGS: 1
DATE: 6/11/2007 12:55:00 AM
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Things are kind of quiet again at the PB&J Campaign. The
buzz over the VeganLunchBox posting has died down a bit, and we’ve been working
on crunching numbers for an interactive feature we’d like to add to the
website. The idea is for people to be able to enter in meals they’ve changed
and see the impact right away. We hope to sum up the environmental and animal
welfare impacts as people enter in their own meal choices so we can have a
running total of how people have changed the world through the PB&J Campaign.
We’re also reaching out towards local web developers,
researching fiscal sponsorship, and checking into possible funding sources. The
first step is to get a handle on the cost of the interactive form and a general
website-overhaul, and then we can look into how much money we’d need to come up
with to pay for it.
If by some stroke of great luck you happen to be willing to
donate a chunk of change to the effort, feel free to contact us. We probably
wouldn’t be able to take it right away, but we’re working our way to having a
budget, lining up funding, and working out a legal status that would let us
accept that funding as charitable donation.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: Hear this post on the radio, sort of
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 5/31/2007 2:04:00 AM
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So I’m typing this in the middle of an interview. The sounds of typing are being recorded for a radio piece by Jennifer Szweda Jordan that she
We assume the results will soon be refuted. I, for one, have lived in countries where peanut butter is not readily available, and I can personally report that the days do seem longer without it. Since day length is a function of the speed of the earth’s rotation, this proves for me that peanut butter does make the world go ’round. However in the interest of letting
people examine sources for themselves to make up their own minds, check out the
site for yourself.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: Time for a PB&J Plan
STATUS: Published
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
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DATE: 5/14/2007 12:19:00 AM
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At the PB&J Campaign we’re trying to figure out what to
next, and then what to do after that. I was talking with Jen a couple nights
ago about some walls we’ve been running up against with our limited technical
ability. There are a lot of things we’d like to do with the website that we
can’t because we simply don’t know how – a form on which we can have people
enter the meals they’ve eaten and we keep a running total of the environmental
impact (adding up GHG emissions or water saved, for example) for example, but also
really simple CSS programming that we simply don’t know enough to do and will
take a little while for us to learn. We got to talking about other projects
beyond the website that we’re thinking of – merchandise, sponsored shows, print
and other marketing, food giveaway projects, etc. We’d love to spend money to
pay someone to develop these things, but we suspect we won’t be able to afford it.
We’d love to raise money to pay for projects, but that’s kind of tricky without
having incorporated as a nonprofit organization. We’re also kicking around the
idea of seeking a fiscal sponsor (forgive me if I’m wandering too far into
nonprofit speak), but we feel like we need some more projects under our belt
before we do that. Of course the projects are things for which we lack the
technical/programming skill and for which we’d like to raise money….
The conversation felt like a more-convoluted version of Bill
and Ted’s discussion of Wyld Stallyns’ classic conundrum. For those who don’t
remember Bill and Ted’s Excellent
Adventure, Wyld Stallyns could never be a super band without a great
guitarist like Eddie Van Halen, but Bill and Ted couldn’t get Eddie Van Halen
as their guitar player without a most triumphant video, for which they’d need
decent instruments, which they didn’t know how to play, which is why they
needed Eddie Van Halen…
Anyhow, I don’t think we’re as hopeless as Wyld Stallyns
(though of course the band did end up changing world history by convincing
everyone to be excellent to each other), but we do need to sit down and figure
out what we want to do and in what order we want to do it. We need to estimate
the resources we’d need to tackle these projects and then work out how to
secure those resources. In short we need to work on a strategic plan.
We’re not sure how deep and detailed this plan will be, but we
think we’ll come up with a much clearer idea of how to proceed over the next
year or so. Of course this planning process implies a bit of a pause in our
outreach project. I don’t think this means everything has to go completely
dormant, but we won’t have quite so much time to spend contacting websites and
other media outlets. We’re not quite sure what to do with the Facebook and
Myspace groups. They’ve stalled out a little lately – not too many new members (the
Facebook group has even lost a couple), and maybe we should take it easy with
the groups while we plan. On the other hand, the groups could be great sites
for discussing new directions for the PB&J Campaign and finding new people
with skills we currently lack to get involved.
Long story short, don’t be surprised if things slow down a
bit at the PB&J Campaign while we’re working on the plan, but if you’d like
to get involved, please let us know – email us at pbj@pbjcampaign.org, and please chime in
is a UK-based environmental website with a lot of resources, including some
interesting and active forums on a huge range of environmental topics. All
proceeds it raises go to support the Surrey Environmental Trust.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: PB&J Campaign on the Allegheny Front!
STATUS: Published
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
ALLOW PINGS: 1
DATE: 5/3/2007 2:37:00 AM
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We’re delighted to report that the Allegheny Front ran the
interview today. It runs at about six minutes. We think it sounds great, and
we’re thrilled to have broken into radio, a new medium for us. I guess now
we’ve got to work on print. If you’ve got six minutes, please check it out.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: The Economics of PB&J
STATUS: Published
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DATE: 4/30/2007 12:19:00 PM
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Lately we’ve been noticing posts on environmental and sustainability forums to the effect of “I can’t afford to buy a Prius. What can I do?” and we’ve been doing our best to get in there and reply with, “try a PB&J!”
Maybe the best way to help the environment is to move – to leave your energy inefficient house and your car commute behind and move into a more-energy-efficient apartment that’s walking or biking distance from work. Short of that you might trade in your gas guzzler for a hybrid, renovate your home to make it more energy efficient, put in new water-saving toilets and a gray water recycling system, or maybe install solar panels on your roof.
We don’t for a second think you should avoid any of these steps if you can afford them, but we realize that all of the above are big and expensive things to do. They take a lot of time, planning, and probably money, and you’ll probably want to proceed carefully and take your time before you take those leaps.
Something you can do right now is change what you’re having for lunch, and maybe even for dinner too. It’s no big deal at all to pack a PB&J instead of a ham sandwich, pick the falafel over the shwarma, or order the black bean soup instead of the meaty chili. It will probably even save you money.
To give credit where it is due, this post was inspired by an observation about the economics of PB&J made by Jennifer Szweda Jordan, a reporter/producer and technical director for the Allegheny Front. That’s a radio show based in Pittsburgh, PA, and I was delighted to have been interviewed for a piece that we think will run this week. We’ll post again once they post the link to the audio file, and please tune in Wednesday evening if you’re in the Pittsburgh (WYEP - 91.3 FM) or Indiana, PA (WIUP - 90.1 FM) areas.
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AUTHOR: Bernard Brown
TITLE: Adventures on Myspace and Facebook
STATUS: Published
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
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DATE: 4/27/2007 12:37:00 PM
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Lately we’ve been working on the Myspace and Facebook pages.
We’ve learned that building up social networking groups is a lot harder than
just emailing people with blogs and websites.
We can contact other people’s who run groups, but Myspace is
so plagued by spam that it’s hard to break through, and Facebook has such
strong anti-spam policies that it’s hard to contact more than a couple people
per day.
Every now and then people post “come join our group”
bulletins on both Facebook and Myspace group sites, but those have always
struck as tacky, and they sometimes annoy the group leaders enough to ban us
completely from their groups.
And then there’s the horrible sense that we’re OLD! Facebook
is almost entirely for college and high school students, and Myspace, while now
apparently populated by more older people, is still dominated by the young. Of
course we’re not that old. I’m
thirty, and everyone else involved with the PB&J Campaign is between
twenty-eight and thirty-six, but I guess that’s old enough to feel out of