The Red, White, and Green

Last month, I wrote about companies that deliver fresh organic produce and groceries directly to your door, and detailed one in particular: Spud, the largest organic food delivery service in North America, serving more than 19,000 customers in major metropolitan areas on the West Coast (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle), in addition to Canada. Well, the folks at Spud kindly offered me the chance to experience their service firsthand, and then relay my thoughts — be they praise or criticisms — to The Red, White, and Green community. So readers, I offer you: the Spud review!

Ordering. Spud has an incredibly engaging and user-friendly website, chock full of tips to help inform its shoppers. There’s a local price comparison sheet compiled every 12 weeks to show how Spud’s prices measure up against organic behemoth Whole Foods, as well as Vons, a Southern California supermarket chain. Spud aims to keep its prices competitive; the first week I ordered, Spud’s produce prices were, on average, 8 percent cheaper than at Whole Foods and 2 percent less than at Vons. There’s also a nifty produce calculator: You enter the number of babies, children, teens, and adults in your household, and it determines how much you need to spend so that every person gets the recommended five daily servings of fruits and vegetables. (For myself and my husband, it’s $30.)

After poring over the website, I decide that for the purposes of my review, I will order groceries that will more likely be prone to error or spoilage — produce, meat, cheese, fresh baked goods, etc. It’s nice to know that Spud offers packaged items like canned aduki beans and organic quinoa, but I trust that those items would probably arrive intact. 

First stop, produce. You can order items individually, or customize what Spud calls its Fresh Harvest Box. Here’s how it works: You indicate your preference for each type of produce Spud offers — you’ll never get an item you don’t like, the website claims — and then select the amount of money you’d like to spend. Spud then formulates your Fresh Harvest Box for the week, based on whatever is fresh and available. The preferences take about 15 minutes to initially set up, but are stored in the system for subsequent orders and can be adjusted anytime. There’s also a local buying option; if you select “local only,” all of your produce will come from within 500 miles.

The process of setting up my Fresh Harvest Box is quite fun, actually, and I’m incredibly impressed by the variety; so much so that I even have to Google what a few of them are (yu choi, anyone?). You can even particularize the varietals. Love Gala apples but can’t stand Red Delicious? Click on “apples,” peruse the checklist of nearly 60 types of apples, and select “never give me Red Delicious apples.” 

Next stop, groceries. I’m amazed at how nearly every bread is sourced locally; French baguette, in my shopping basket you go! Most of the eggs are local as well, as is the milk, which travels a mere 16 miles from farm to warehouse. Cheese seems a bit pricey, and the chicken is a hefty $13.49/lb, but after reading that this local chicken was formerly only available to the best restaurants in town — Matsuhisa and Spago, for starters — I decide to give it a try. The boneless breasts are smaller than the ones packaged at my local Trader Joe’s, so the price actually ends up being comparable. I figure that with such high quality, I’ll be satisfied with a smaller portion. One neat bonus is that you receive 5 percent off most grocery items you add to a standing order.

When I check out, I notice that in addition to the refundable deposits for the insulated bag and dry ice that will accompany my order, there’s also a 22 cent carbon charge, which is used to buy carbon offsets to make my purchase completely carbon neutral. I think that’s neat, but I wonder if some customers find it a turnoff.

My first delivery. Apartment-dwelling customers have the option of providing Spud with a building key, so that they don’t have to wait around for delivery. I, however, decline this option. Luckily, my order arrives at a prompt 11 am.

My first Spud organic delivery: 1/2 gallon of milk, bunched carrots, 3 onions, 1/2 pint of strawberries, 2 boneless chicken breasts, asparagus, 3 lbs yellow creamer potatoes, 5 lbs russet potatoes, and a baguette

The total for the delivery (not including the refundable deposits for the insulated bag and dry ice) is $33.93; not bad, considering the quality of the produce and the convenience of having it delivered to my front door. Everything looks just lovely: the onions are smooth and firm, the strawberries smell like my childhood, and those are two of the most perfect (chicken) breasts I’ve ever seen. And the chicken even turns out to be $8.38/lb, not the $13.49/lb shown on the website (Spud’s error, but at least it’s in my favor).

But wait, where are the eggs I ordered? The printed sheet that accompanies my delivery says my brand is not available. That’s a bit inconvenient, I think. It’s not the end of the world for me, but what if I had been a single mother with two young children? I would have had to make a trip to the store just to go pick up some eggs. One simple remedy would have been to send me an e-mail the day before my order that notified me that my selection was out of stock, and ask me if I’d like a substitution. And why do I have two giant bags of potatoes? I know I selected potatoes as one of my “always include whenever available,” but 8 lbs is a lot for two people to consume in one week. My carrots, too, arrive a bit limp and peaky looking. One day later in the fridge, they’ve turned to rubber. 

Where Spud really wins, however, is taste. I almost can’t believe my mouth when I eat dinner that night, prepared simply so that the flavors of the produce and meat shine. The asparagus is some of the best I’ve had — firm, fat stalks that taste just picked — and the chicken, aside from being gloriously tender, tastes fresh and well, chicken-y; this is definitely not the tasteless flesh I’ve come to expect from chicken. My baked russet is wonderfully creamy and sweet inside, and I savor every bite of its earthy, crunchy skin. I don’t think I’ve ever been so satisfied after a meal. 

I’m not as lucky with the bread, however. The Spud website says I’ve ordered a local artisan French baguette, but what I bite into, although soft and fresh, tastes more like it’s from a chain grocery store or cheap Italian restaurant. I know what a baguette is, and this isn’t it.

I’m sure there’s a bit of a learning curve with Spud — discovering which brands you enjoy, tweaking your Fresh Harvest Box preferences to ensure you get the veggies you really want — so I figure that some of my concerns will be remedied with my next delivery.

My second delivery. A few days before my next delivery, I change my produce preferences to encourage a bit more variety and make sure another five pounder of potatoes isn’t coming my way. This time, my confirmation email details exactly what is in the Fresh Harvest Box (the confirmation email for the prior week did not), so I’m able to make a few minor adjustments at the last minute.

My second Spud organic delivery: green chard, asparagus, dozen eggs, 1/2 pint strawberries, cauliflower, two grapefruit, two heads of garlic, two garnet yams, spinach, kale

The total for this delivery (before deposits) is $33.76, and this time around, I’m quite pleased at the produce selection. The garnet yams are huge and virtually unblemished, the grapefruits are heavy and juicy, and the head of cauliflower is a little firm gem. The eggs, at long last, have nary a crack and are still cold to the touch, despite sitting at my back door for an hour before I get home. Everything looks perfection except for the chard, which is wilted and floppy. It seems odd that in both deliveries, I received one item of produce that was less than stellar, given the superior quality of everything else. My only other quibble? I’m surprised, given all of Spud’s hyping of “local farm to you,” that the asparagus is packaged in a plastic container. It seems unnecessary; even at my local supermarket, asparagus comes bunched with a lone rubber band. I was expecting loose spinach, as well; I can get a plastic bag of Earthbound Farm pre-washed spinach any day at Whole Foods. 

So, the ultimate question: Would I become a repeat customer? I’m not sure, given that I truly enjoy meandering around Whole Foods and farmers markets on a regular basis (plus it’s good fodder for my blog). But I think that Spud could be a godsend for time-strapped eco- and health-conscious foodies, especially those living in urban areas. I wouldn’t hesitate to order from Spud again, especially if I know I’m in for some particularly busy weeks. After all, with the couple of hours I saved by avoiding my usual distracted-by-free-samples trip to Whole Foods, I was able to write this in-depth review of Spud! 

True to Spud’s goal of outstanding customer service, they were kind enough to provide this response: Sorry about the eggs and for some of the beat-up produce. Sometimes mistakes can happen because Spud Los Angeles is a very small and growing operation. That said, there is still no excuse; however, as a consolation, please know that Spud offers a 100 percent satisfaction guarantee. When you log in, simply click on the “100 percent satisfaction guarantee” on the home page…there is a link to our “request a refund” page [so] you can let us know what you weren’t happy with and get your money back. No questions or hassle –limp vegetables, bread not good enough, missing eggs — it’s all taken care of. But, of course, our goal is to have no mistakes ever.

–Jennifer Grayson

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The original reasons for the prohibition of pork consumption in ancient Jewish and Islamic cultures were most likely practical, rather than spiritual. Unlike cows and chickens, which are vegetarian by nature and graze on grain (and also grass, in the case of cows), pigs are omnivorous scavengers that feed on anything they encounter, including garbage and carrion, and were thus deemed unclean. This turned out to be a prescient decision; thousands of years would pass between the banning of pork consumption in Leviticus 11:7 and the discovery of trichinosis in 1835 by a young London medical student named James Paget.

There were likely other reasons for the biblical banning of pork, both ecological and economical: namely, that pigs require plenty of water for the muddy coating in which they thrive and prefer shady woods environments — two things that were hard to come by in the desert land that is now Israel and the Middle East. And because pigs do not forage on grass (not that there was a lot of grass there, anyway), expensive grain meant for human consumption would have been diverted to raising them as livestock.

Luckily, modern day farming and food safety practices have eliminated the health concerns of our ancestors, right? 

It should be seen as no coincidence that the two most recent flu pandemics to emerge in recent history — avian flu and now, possibly, swine flu — bear the same names as the livestock raised via two of the largest and filthiest types of factory farms on the planet. 

Mike Davis, professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, wrote yesterday in The Guardian about the acceleration of swine flu evolution:

Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers. In 1965, for instance, there were 53 million US hogs on more than 1 million farms; today, 65 million hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

And journalist David Kirby, who is currently completing a new book on industrial animal production for St. Martin’s Press, reported Sunday in The Huffington Post on the link between CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) and swine flu:

For years, leading scientists around the world have worried that large-scale, indoor swine “factories” would become breeding grounds for new pathogens that could more easily infect humans and then spread out rapidly in the general population — threatening to become a global pandemic.

We know that hog workers in Europe and North America are far more likely than others to be infected with potentially lethal pathogens such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), drug-resistant E. coli and salmonella, and of course, swine influenza. Many scientists also believe that people who work inside CAFOs are more at risk of contracting and spreading these and other “zoonotic” diseases than those working in smaller-scale operations, with outdoor pens or pasture and far lower animal density.

Now, I didn’t highlight kosher dietary practices to suggest that the threat of swine flu makes the actual meat of pork unsafe to eat — at present, the CDC is advising that properly cooked pork is still safe for human consumption, and that you cannot catch swine flu from eating pork or pork products (although the prospect of a global swine flu pandemic certainly makes that morning bacon a wee bit unappetizing). But just as the ancient Jews and Muslims considered their surroundings and the consequences of raising pigs as livestock when formulating their dietary laws — insufficient environmental resources like water, unsanitary conditions that could lead to disease — we, too, must now seriously look at the environmental repercussions of widespread factory farming. And with the looming threat of a worldwide influenza pandemic that could very well have originated from the farming practices that supply your morning Egg McMuffin, we have to ask ourselves: Is it worth it?

–Jennifer Grayson

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Feeling guilty about not celebrating Earth Day earlier this week? Want to make a real difference in our city? (How about just an excuse for a little exercise and a beautiful day in the SoCal sun?) Join 30Barack and North East Trees (and me!) from 8 am to 1 pm tomorrow on the California State Parks Foundation’s Wetland Restoration project at Rio de Los Angeles State Park just north of downtown Los Angeles. (8 am on a Saturday morning too early? Come by later for a couple of hours.)

The park is situated along the LA River, which in 1995 was named the second most endangered river in America. The revitalization of the park is seen by many as the key to the future Los Angeles River Greenway, a network of riverfront parks that will extend from the western San Fernando Valley to Long Beach Harbor along the 51-mile LA River corridor, connecting neighborhoods and increasing water quality along the way. At the event, we’ll be learning about native plants and wetland ecology, removing non-native invasive plants and planting native species, and most of all, having FUN!

To read more about the Rio de Los Angeles State Park project and sign up for the event, click here.

–Jennifer Grayson

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Yesterday I hopped on my bike (it was proclaimed Car Free Day, even though the streets of LA seemed as clogged as ever with traffic) and headed over to the Wilshire Center Earth Day celebration. The outdoor event, which featured live music, a farmers market, free electronic waste recycling, and booths for local green vendors, seemed to be well attended. The celebration wasn’t entirely free of greenwashing (since when do green tea weight loss drinks classify as eco-friendly?), but all in all, I was impressed by the local green businesses that set up shop for the day.

Reusable canvas totes made in LA; www.theinconvenientbag.com

Scrumptious pesticide-free strawberries grown in San Bernadino

The green bunny

Beautiful handcrafted totes made from recycled rice bags

Stay tuned in the coming weeks for in-depth profiles of some of the local businesses featured at the Earth Day event!

–Jennifer Grayson

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I used to complain to my mom that there wasn’t a Kid’s Day on the calendar along with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. “Every day is Kid’s Day,” she would proclaim. Well, I second that sentiment with regard to Earth Day. But since the actual day is today, mark the occasion by making a promise to celebrate the Earth every day by adopting just one of these five simple changes into your daily routine. 

1. Wean yourself off the plastic bottle. Over 67 billion beverage cans and bottles have been landfilled, littered, and incinerated in the US alone so far this year. Those are containers that haven’t been recycled. Get a Brita pitcher or faucet filter for home, and buy a Sigg bottle for on the go. And if you’re a pop drinker, consider a home soda maker.

2. BYOB. Bag, that is. Start a collection of reusable canvas totes, and bring them with you to the grocery store. Or any store, for that matter. I have a cute purple mesh EcoSac that I keep in my purse for other shopping excursions; I’ve even taken it into Barney’s. 

3. Adopt Meatless Monday. Robert Lawrence from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health proposes Meatless Monday as a way to help reduce climate change, minimize worldwide water usage, and help reduce fossil fuel dependence. All that from a few measly meals, you say? Imagine if the whole country adopted this plan. And you don’t have to start eating tofu and tempeh, either. Many of your favorite healthy and budget friendly foods — like veggie chili, eggplant parmigiana, and falafel — are already vegetarian. Does a whole day seem too challenging? Start with one meal a week.

4. Go to bed an hour earlier. Does your bedtime keep inching toward the midnight hour (or past it)? I know, it’s hard to turn the lights out when there are so many episodes of Top Chef just waiting for you on the DVR. But by staying up late and keeping those lights on, not to mention the TV and computer, you’re burning up energy unnecessarily. And if you need another reason, consider that the evidence is mounting that an earlier bedtime and adequate sleep are essential to your mood, waistline, and overall health.

5. Talk about it. The only way change will occur at the global level is if more and more people become conscious of how nearly every decision we make has its corresponding impact on the world we live in. Now I’m not saying you should regularly lecture your friends about the evils of meat-eating and not recycling, but your actions do influence others. The best way to convince is to lead by example. Take your mom with you to the farmer’s market, go shopping with your friends and proudly sport your reusable tote, ask your employer how your office can start recycling copy paper.

It’s amazing how quickly little changes can add up. Stick to one and you’ll soon feel empowered to take on more. Happy Earth Day!

–Jennifer Grayson

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The pesticide/Parkinson’s link has long been a leading theory among scientists researching the disease, but now researchers at UCLA have uncovered substantial evidence that two specific pesticides — maneb and parquat — trigger the neurodegenerative process that leads to Parkinson’s disease. The epidemiological study, which followed residents of California’s Central Valley — one of the most vital crop-growing regions in the US — found that years of exposure to these two combined pesticides increased the risk of developing the disease by a startling 75 percent. Age of exposure was also found to be an important risk factor in the study: For those diagnosed with Parkinson’s at age 60 or younger, prolonged pesticide exposure in childhood or adolescence increased their risk even more significantly.

“The results confirmed two previous observations from animal studies,” says Beate Ritz, professor of epidemiology at the UCLA School of Public Health and the study’s senior author. “One, that exposure to multiple chemicals may increase the effect of each chemical. That’s important, since humans are often exposed to more than one pesticide in the environment. And second, that the timing of exposure is also important.”

For the full story, click here. 

–Jennifer Grayson

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Spencer Brown, founder and visionary of environmentally sustainable moving company Rent-a-Green Box, was kind enough to offer a follow-up response to my post last week regarding the specific cost savings his company offers the consumer:

Something to think about in terms of cost savings: Most moves are 70 percent labor and 30 percent material, and we reduce labor by 20 percent due to the speed [of packing and moving, loading and unloading], which can have a huge impact on the end bill. We had a mover who estimated 12 hours at $120 an hour, and with [the Rent-a-Green-Box] system did the move in eight hours; that’s a $480 savings…. The other cost savings that we don’t market is the savings for not breaking or replacing any items that would be crushed or damaged with a cardboard box.

Brown, who won California’s 2008 Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Award (GEELA) in the category of technological and market innovation for the Recopack, Rent-a-Green Box’s rentable and reusable moving box made from 100 percent recycled plastics diverted from local landfills, has clearly struck gold (green) with his company’s business model. Even if you’re not persuaded by the company’s laudable environmental profile — saving trees, keeping cardboard boxes and packing materials out of the landfill, creating a reusable product from recycled trash — the convenience and cost-savings of the service alone should convince you.

–Jennifer Grayson

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Drew Barrymore on the May 2009 cover of Elle's "Blue Issue," photographed by Alexei Hay

The new “blue” issue of Elle arrived in my mailbox yesterday, thankfully minus the unnecessary shrink wrap that seems to accompany so many subscription mailings these days. So, is blue the new green? Elle chose to take this twist on its annual green issue, says Editor-In-Chief Roberta Meyers in her editor’s letter this month, “because all environmental problems eventually flow back to water — the one element so integral to everybody and everything on this planet — which is wasted and polluted so profligately.”

Blue, green, whatever you want to call it; that nearly every magazine, fashion and otherwise, has published an environmentally focused issue this year shows that eco hasn’t just hit the mainstream — it is the hot topic.

–Jennifer Grayson

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It’s been several years since my last move, but since then, I’ve been saving that move’s cardboard boxes in the garage in the hopes of one day reusing them. After all, they weren’t easy to procure. At the time, there were only two budget- and eco-friendly moving options: amass a collection of used cardboard boxes from liquor stores, dumpsters, and “free used box” postings on Craigslist; or use a service like UsedCardboardBoxes.com, which, just like it sounds, sells used cardboard boxes online and delivers them to your door. But even used cardboard boxes, it’s worth noting, are not a guilt-free solution; ultimately, they wind up in a landfill — not to mention all the trees that are initially cut down to manufacture those boxes.

Thankfully, Spencer Brown, the founder of Rent-a-Green Box, a three-year-old startup based out of Costa Mesa, CA, has come up with an ingenious solution: the Recopack (recycled ecological packing solution), a reusable green (both eco-friendly and the color green) box made from 100 percent hard-to-recycle plastic trash culled from local landfills. Available in three sizes, the Recopacks are delivered to your door a week before you move, allowing you time to pack, and are then picked up at your new place a week after you move. The company has also created a dizzying array of packing accoutrements made from creatively recycled materials, including “recocubes,” an alternative to petroleum-based styrofoam packing peanuts made from 100 percent recycled newspaper sludge; the “reco-dolly,” made from 100 percent recycled aluminum cans; and the unforgettably named “poopy pallet,” made from recycled (and sanitized) baby diapers. Oh, and the Recopacks and packing materials are delivered to your home by the company’s fleet of veggie oil- and bio-fueled trucks. 

My friends used Rent-a-Green Box for their recent local move, so I was able to see the Recopacks in action. They’re lightweight, very durable, and stack easily. They’re also relatively affordable: about $199 for a 2-person, 2-bedroom apartment move; a similar moving pack from UsedCardboardBoxes.com goes for $123 (brand-new cardboard boxes from U-Haul will run you about $165). The Rent-a-Green Box website claims that its service will cut your packing and moving costs by 50 percent, although most of the explanation linked to that claim has to do with time savings (not having to break down all of those cardboard boxes, etc.) rather than hard costs (although time is money).  

Currently, Rent-a-Green Box is only available in Los Angeles and Orange County, as well as areas of the Inland Empire and San Diego County, but the company is growing and has plans to expand nationwide over the next three years. 

Have you used Rent-a-Green Box for a recent move? Drop me a note and let me know how it went!

–Jennifer Grayson

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Those who need more evidence of the value of using a shopping tool like GoodGuide need only look to today’s report by environmental marketing agency TerraChoice, which says that a whopping 98 percent of products labeled “green” mislead consumers about their true environmental benefits or company practices. 

Greenwashing, or the practice of making unsubstantiated claims about the environmental benefits of a product, is sure to increase along with the growing number of green products in the mainstream marketplace; the Terra Choice report notes that the number of eco products available in the stores it surveys increased dramatically from 2007 to 2009.

“The good news is that the growing availability of green products shows that consumers are demanding more environmentally responsible choices, and that marketers and manufacturers are listening,” says Scot Case, vice president of TerraChoice. “The bad news is that TerraChoice’s survey of 2,219 consumer products in the U.S. and Canada shows that 98 percent committed at least one sin of greenwashing and that some marketers are exploiting consumers’ demand for third-party certification by creating fake labels or false suggestions of third-party endorsement. Despite the number of legitimate eco labels out there, consumers will still have to remain vigilant in their green purchasing decisions.”

Download the full report.

–Jennifer Grayson

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