Foods you can prepare without a kitchen

Making our own food is an important step towards sustainability, not because buying prepared food is inherently unsustainable but because much of the processed food available isn't currently sustainable- packaging, industrial agricultural practices, non-local ingredients, food ingredients based on unrealistically cheap corn, all these things make most packaged, prepared foods unsustainable and unhealthy. Our health is an important part of environmentalism and sustainable living not just because good health is intimately tied to more sustainable food practices like buying locally grown organic produce, but also because a healthy nation and a well nourished world give rise to healthy minds as well as bodies, and healthy minds empowered to make better choices for the future of this world. The healthy mind comes from the nutrients in healthy food as well as from a change in our relationship with food that leads to changes in our relationship with nature and the plants and animals we make our food from.

This guide is for people living in dorms and bachelor units or any other situation where a kitchen isn't available. With a little time and effort, (not to mention sneakiness) you can get away with making these food items without a kitchen, but you will need some inexpensive and basic items such as an electric hot plate, measuring cups and spoons,and a couple of pots among various other small items. I won't explain the details of each of the processes outlined below. Instead, I will give an overview and provide you with a link or links to learn more on your own. Making your own food empowers and liberates, enabling you to control your diet and therefore your health in all aspects as it relates to your diet.

Kombucha

My kombucha home brew and kombucha mother giving off a mouth
watering aroma of sweet and sour smells.

Soda is bad for your health. It is loaded with high fructose corn syrup and empty calories. Once you get out of the habit of drinking it, it doesn't even really taste very good. Kombucha on the other hand is a healthy, low calorie carbonated alternative.

Kombucha is fermented tea, usually black tea. You take sugar, water, black tea and make tea like you normally would. Then you add the kombucha 'mushroom' which is just a collection of yeasts and bacteria, and in about a week you have your own kombucha ready to drink. If you don't have a kombucha mother already, you can make one using store bought kombucha as a starter.

The resulting drink is virtually nonalcoholic. It will be sweet and sour, more sweet or more sour depending on how long you let it brew. Some find that it is an acquired taste, meaning it is strong and different until you get used to it. I liked it at once. If you've never tried it, you can get it at the mini mart tucked away in the back of the ASUCLA store in Ackerman. For more information on brewing Kombucha go here.

Yogurt
Making yogurt is suprisingly simple. All you need is any kind of milk (cow, goat, soy, whole, lowfat, fatfree), a small container of plain yogurt with live active cultures to act as a starter, a small electric burner ($15) to boil milk, a small electric heating pad, a yogurt or candy thermometer (or any food thermometer will do), a couple of pots (one without a handle that fits inside the other), a container to store your yogurt in, and some instructions. It only takes about a day to get yogurt.

Bread
Bread makers allow you to make your own bread almost anywhere. I found mine used for $8 at a garage sale and I've seen several at Salvation Army Thrift Store. In other words, they're not too hard to come by used and usually at a bargain price. Making bread with a bread machine is easy. Add water, salt, oil, flour, and yeast. Close the lid. Select the proper setting. Press 'start'. The machine does the kneeding, rising, and baking for you. In about 3 hours you have fresh bread.

Solar Oven Cuisine

A solar oven is ridiculously easy to make. By using mirrors, foil, or anything with high albedo, you can make a solar powered oven that focuses the suns raises on a pot of stew, beans, chicken noodle soup, a grass fed pastured pork roast, or anything else you think up. It takes longer to heat up compared but will reach temperatures between 350 and 400 degrees. If you're wondering where to put it and leave it for a few hours outside, look no further than the roofs over your heads. High rise roof tops are often accessible to tenants and make perfect places to cook a meal with solar energy. For solar oven plans and instructions go here.

Toaster Oven Cuisine
If you don't want to make a solar over, any small toaster oven, even an Easy Bake Oven, will work for making cookies, pies, and brownies or cooking small meals, chickens, or roasts. A convection toaster oven is even better because it uses a small fan to circulate air during cooking, using convection to increase efficiency and cut down cooking temperatures and cooking times.

My response to Radical Simplicity

There's an old Johny Cash song called One Piece at a Time about an automobile factory worker who, over many years, steals an entire Cadillac by sneaking out the pieces in his lunch box...one piece at a time. The car he eventually ends up with is a hodgepodge of pieces from different eras, a one of a kind, all his own. This is my life- a patchwork of experiences, events, and dispositions; a history of ideas and goals, some completed, others forgotten; an ever changing taste in food, fashion, work and hobbies; a collage of memories of the things that have most shaped me; a current set of habits and things I do, of people I know, of desires and plans I have. In some ways I think we are all some strange car emerging from the pieces of our past that we pick up along the way, along circuitous paths- through childhood, at school, in relationships, on the job, from adolescence into adulthood... This is why I could never see before where I am now or where I am going with absolute certainty.

If you'd asked me ten years ago what type of lifestyle I thought I would be living now my answer would in many ways reflect my current lifestyle because I still live in the same city, in the same society. But that's not precisely right either, because the city and society have been evolving all along. Environmentalism has begun to hit the mainstream. Ten years ago, in my eyes, organic produce was a novelty item strictly for those who could afford it. I had no notion of why people would go for something so hoaky a label as "organic". I scoffed at the small organic sections one would occasionally see at the supermarket. I refused to shop at Whole Foods or Wild Oats, even though the food there looked delicious, because I thought it was too expensive- a ripoff. I had heard of global warming but didn't know anything about it. I knew the rainforests and rest of the environment were in peril, that exotic and wonderful animals were going extinct around the globe, and I cared immensely.

Yet I also took for granted that unless I completely shifted course in life, there was nothing I could do about any of the problems our earth was facing. I accepted most of the things I'd grown up used to as obvious truths about the reality of modern life. My main focus in life at the time was graduating from college and going on to graduate school in Anthropology where I would go on intellectual odysseys. My free time was consumed by my first serious but ill-fated relationship and my love to travel, hike, and occasionally backpack took up leisure time. I just didn't give sustainable living much thought except perhaps in certain situations where it was an abstraction to discuss, an ideological topic and not a very pressing one. I don't think I'd even heard of the term 'sustainable' yet. I seem to recall that in very stressful, frustrating moments, I entertained casual thoughts about ditching my plans for grad school and running of with Green Peace, but I can't remember and now its doubtful.

I wasn't then nor am I now a green saint. But I was no Merkel either. The thought of working for the military industrial complex or worse, actually being in the military was unsettling because I'd always been a pacifist, more or less. Merkel recalls the pivotal moment of change towards radical simplicity as one in which he was faced with the brutal reality of his lifestyle and his work on computers in the defense industry. The catalyst and what startled him into consciousness was the Exxon Valdez catastrophe. For myself, I can claim no such moment of clarity. My interests in and transitioning towards a more sustainable and simpler way of life has been gradual and motivated by many ongoing situations and events in the world. The longer Bush was president, the more his anti-environmental stupidity got to me. I started rock climbing and spending several weeks a year out doors, in the woods, mountains, and desserts of California and the Southwest. I continued my studies but as I fed my love of the outdoors that love grew. I'd be a liar if I said this love for the natural world didn't outgrow my love of spending hours writing drudgery at my computer in the university research library. In retrospect it is a slow, steady shifting and maturing of beliefs and values that appears to have led me to the stage I am in now, a stage Merkel calls conscious unsustainability. To be fair, this stage is really about transitioning out of unsustainability, not just being aware of how you live unsustainably. I just received my Wonder Wash and Vortex Blender in the mail (both hand powered gadgets for the aspiring sustainability guru) but I have a long, LONG way to go still. My footprint? Well below the American average but far from the 4.5 acres Merkel advocates. So where to next? Where do I see myself in ten years?

Ten years from now I envision myself owning and living in an Earthship or something just as green and sustainable, perhaps with a child or two at most to raise and mostly free time to do the things that matter most- being sustainable, helping others to be sustainable, and spending plenty of time exploring mother nature. Part of this will of course be growing all my own fruits and vegetables and preparing and preserving all my own food. I will have chickens for eggs and maybe goats for milk and cheese or just for watching them do silly goat things. Rabbits? Oh yes several rabbits and a compost bin as well. I definitely do not see myself having a traditional type job- unless of course it is teaching. But before I settle on teaching as a career, I have a few other ideas up my sleeve. Before I read Radical Simplicity I assumed that in order to survive and have any of the things that I wanted, I would have to put up with the drudgery of a typical full time job, academic or otherwise. Now I realize how creative you can be with your own lifestyle, which means being creative with how you make money and how you spend it. Yet I don't want to promise or refuse to live as radically as Merkel or in precisely the same manner. I can't predict what problems or solutions I may discover on this path towards sustainability. Afterall, I am a strange car, building myself one piece at a time. Merkel evinces an entrepreneurial spirit in the way he has gone about making sustainable living his fulltime love, hobby, and job. And he has been very successful at it. That gives tremendous hope to anyone who feels trapped between their beliefs and values about the environment and social justice on the one hand and on the other hand, living in the most unsustainable society in the history of the planet. It provides hope and a model, not for a way out, but a way onward towards a better, more just, more fulfilling way of life.

Over the midterm, I have my work cut out for me. Next year, if progress towards my long term goals means taking my life in a new direction, you won't find me in grad school. In the mean time, I'm teaching this seminar and learning a tremendous amount about sustainable lifestyles. Progress towards sustainability comes in spurts. Learning to cook, learning what alternative technologies are out there and taking the time to make use of them (like the Wonder Wash), developing a disposition in life towards life that is most consistent with what I value and believe to be humankind's priorities- saving the planet and ourselves for future generations- these processes have a learning curve. They take time. We evolve gradually towards a better self, a stronger community, and a greener world, one piece at a time.

Epilogue, addendum, my response to others responses

One reason I like teaching this course is that my students think of things that I hadn't and that sheds some light on their perspectives and gives me ideas I hadn't thought of. The follow are some comments in response to several sentiments that my students had in response to Radical SImplicity that I may not have shared or may not have felt as strongly. I will summarize those sentiments as I understood them and then present my responses to those sentiments.

- One sentiment is that Merkel expects us all to be just like him.
- Another is that he is unusual, wacky, a dreamer, out of touch with the mainstream, truly a radical.
- A third is that b/c Merkel's situation (when he decided to go radically simpler) was quite different from my students' current situations that this draws into doubt whether any of us can ever realistically hope to be wholly sustainable individuals.
- A fourth is that parts of the book where Merkel shares his beliefs about spirituality and nature make the reader feel uncomfortable (unless you already agree with him; and BTW I didn't, not exactly).
- A fifth is that if you want to raise a family, you can't live the simple, sustainable life like Merkel and a few others have tried to live.

Here are my unedited responses that mostly address these sentiments:

Just to be clear, Merkel is radical, not "a radical" (and not that you called him one). I don't think what he is doing is unrealistic b/c he's a culture creator. He along with others like him are part of a movement lead by cultural innovators, and he's one of the movement's many drivers. The work he is doing now, of trying to drive a society and its cultures away from one way of life and in the direction of another kind of lifestyle will have unpredictable results. I don't look at his model as an either/or option. We don't have to commit to living exactly like Merkel or dismiss any of his ideas because we can't predict when and if they will work for us. As more people adopt more sustainable practices, new solutions will be found that Merkel did not think of. Still others will be absent in which case a bit of radical simplicity will be necessary. Not everyone will be living in the woods off $5000 dollars. But most people will find that they don't need 5 cars, a ginormous house, 10 TVs and Playstations, an RV towing a Hummer stacked with motorbikes and kids toys. They will find instead that they get fulfillment out of doing things like growing all their own fruits and vegetables, biking to work, camping in a tent instead of purchasing an RV. If Merkel had only subscribed to a few of these alternatives, he wouldn't make a very good hero. In order to demonstrate that simpler living is doable and fulfilling, you need an extreme version as an example before you can get society to work the rest out for itself. If you have a family with children then you will have to do more than just read Radical Simplicity to get ideas on how to subsist greenly. The Dervaes family in Pasadena, AKA the Urban Homesteaders, make a fine model of how a family of 5 I believe can live entirely off of just $30,000/yr and not be poor and not be wanting. Initial investments may require making more money to get started, especially in a big city, so its up to people like you guys to figure out innovative solutions to the sorts of problems that Merkel doesn't deal with. Imagine a society that lies somewhere between LA and Kerala, but veering more towards Kerala, where people are educated and healthy, women have lots of rights, people grow a lot of their own food, and I think you'll be imagining a pretty interesting and exciting place to live. Another point I want to make is that we don't have to make all these changes to our lifestyle all at once, mostly because we can't. We don't have the knowledge or resources that someone like Merkel had when he wrote his book. As we gradually make the changes that we can, we will find that the things we value and the things we want out of life will evolve alongside our evolving lifestyle. You may be surprised to find yourself being more radically simple and sustainable 10 years from now than you thought was possible, without even realizing it, simply because your tastes, preferences, assumptions, your world view changed too as you evolved different ways of living.

As for Merkel's wackiness, spiritual or otherwise, I agree that he does seem a bit different by the end. But that is primarily a reflection of the fact that he has chosen a radically different path than most, has done so largely on his own or with just a few others, and so has developed a different sort of spirituality and a different way of articulating that spirituality than mainstream society. Any time someone truly lives radically (e.g. maybe becomes a nun or monk; joins guerrilla fighters; or becomes an academic- yes if you stay here at UCLA long enough you will in many respects stop being mainstream) you can expect to develop different world views than the masses. If you could see the sequence of events in his life leading to the development of those views as they were unfolding, it wouldn't seem as unjustifiable. Yet the unfamiliar always strikes one as odd or questionable at first, no matter if it really is or isn't rational and justifiable. I wasn't too concerned with his version of spirituality, nor am I very concerned with anyone else's for that matter. I didn't agree with everything he wrote either. But that's ok because he has a lot of useful tools for reshaping your own views to suit your own codes and values in such a way that while you probably will not, nor would you want to, become a carbon copy of Merkel, you will discover sustainable ways to live your own life.

Is the grass really greener? Rethinking UCLA's largest crop and the American dream

No, this article's title is not in reference to wacky tobacky, medical or otherwise. I'm talking about good ol' all American turf. The stuff you grew up skinning your knees on and rolling around in until you itched like crazy. This Wednesday, the Daily Bruin's headline piece was all about UCLA lawn care in the aftermath of the weekend long LA Times Festival of Books, which took place spread out across the many lawned quads in the heart of campus. The result of tents and people was most definitely bad for the lawns, but have no fear. They should be back in tip top shape in days or weeks- just in time for graduation most likely, when more tents, chairs, and people will mash down and kill the lawns. Use of these lawns is only intermittent and by departmental or adminstrative preference ("Wouldn't be nice to have graduation out on the lawn!?") not out of necessity. I pose the question, Is there a better use of these lawns than that of growing lawns?

With over 80% of US households maintaining a private lawn, grass isn't as green as it looks. Estimates vary but the total area of lawns in the US is somewhere between 15 and 30 million acres! Let's put this into perspective. About 10 million acres of cotton are harvested per year; 70-80 million acres of corn; 50 million acres of wheat; and less than 5 million of rice (more details). Harvesting these crops generates billions of dollars in revenue each year. Wow! Grass could be a major player in US agriculture right? Um...well not really because you see, here in America, we don't really do anything with our lawns except trample them, water them, mow them, and trample them some more. Until recently, all the mowed grass went to landfills. Now, some cities have composting programs but not nearly enough to handle the large crop of grass clippings that are wasted each year. And how many pesticides are sprayed and how many gallons of water poured into a crop with little value other than its use value? I have no idea, but consider this use-value next time you cruise through your neighborhood. Let's say your driving down your street...no wait...You're riding your bike down your street- there, that's greener- what percentage of lawns are actually being used for playing, lounging, pooping (if you're a dog) or some other activity? I have no idea but usually in my neighborhood there's nobody 'lawning' or whatever it is you call it, unless of course its Saturday afternoon and lawns are being mowed.

If you asked me, I'd say this situation appears to be a shamefully wasteful and destructive one. No one asks me though and when I mention it, it gets me in trouble. Why? Because people love their lawns. They are infatuated with them and hold and ideal image of home that includes a soft, poofy, 4 inch thick mat of green lawn framing the suburban abode and distinguishing one plot (and neighbor) from the next. Just to prove how much people adore their lawns and think of them as a necessity, I'll tell you a story.

I was once strolling across one of UCLA's wide grassy quads, talking with someone I'd just met when the subject of grass came up. I commented that UCLA should get rid of all of its unused lawns because they were wasteful and required constant fertilizing and upkeep. I might has well have insulted this persons family honor because they were not pleased with me at all. "What?! Are you kidding?! You can't get rid of this grass! Don't you love it? Why would you suggest such a thing.." The disbelief and offense in their voice betrayed such sentimental fondness. "Well, I won't go there- on that lawn- again," I thought, and we dropped the subject.

But here I am again, on that lawn, that big, green, and wide expanse of American dream dotted with doggy doody that many of us, myself included, share a fondness for (the grass, not the doody). Is it somehow blasphemy to say we should get rid of it? Part of some pinko commie liberal plot? I don't think so. It just seems like common sense: Keep the parks, the soccer fields, the baseball diamonds, but get rid of the lawns. And do what? Grow something else instead? Precisely. Grow food instead. A garden uses less water and saves you loads of money on organic produce. Grow food and share it or trade it with your neighbors because that builds solidarity within your community. If you want, keep a nice small plot of lawn in the middle so you can lie there surrounded on all sides by the bountiful fruits of your labor. These fruits are substantial, not aesthetic. You can live off them, as has the Dervaes family of Pasadena, a model of self-sufficiency, frugality, and innovation amongst Los Angeles's big city suburban sprawl. It doesn't get more local than picking food from your own yard. If you want to live the American dream with American ideals then take out the lawns and grow your own food. To my mind, the Dervaes are the quintessential all-American family- they are self-sufficient, hardy, and innovative like the pioneers; they are frugal entrepreneurs who make a living off of the goods they grow to meet local demand for healthy organic produce; they represent family and community values by the children they've raised (who still live at home and help out with the business of growing and selling produce) and by the community they've fostered through educational efforts and regular neighborhood potlucks. This could be the alternative to the American Lawn, if people would let go of their sentimental fondness for green turf and be open to more traditional alternatives.

So, at risk of offending grass-lovers all over again, I ask, "Is there a better use of UCLA's lawns than that of growing lawns for aesthetic purposes and the occasional book fair?" By now you should know what the answer to this is. We should tear out some, most in fact but not all, of the lawns and turn the remaining spaces into student run organic community gardens that produce fruits and vegetables for the dining halls and for a student run farmers market. I envision a hillside next to Janss steps, stepped with garden plots, park benches, and cozy patches of lawn where you can take a nap between classes and munch on a peach or apple while friends tend to their garden plots. I challenge anyone and everyone to come up with a good reason why this shouldn't be so. It would save UCLA loads of money on food. It would teach business and entrepeneurial skills to UCLA students. It would provide an opportunity for UCLA to become a leader in alternative, sustainable agricultural programs. It would create a strong sense of community and community values on campus that would spread to communities around the country as graduates went off to find their way in life, taking with them a strong belief in protecting the environment and building up local, sustainable, food economies. I don't know about you, but to me this sounds like a pretty appetizing recipe for success, for everyone involved...except maybe John Deere.

American Bird Conservancy on Predation of Birds by Domestic Cats

Rabbits as the more sustainable house pet

Bunelope and Ukku, best friends after a day of hard work shredding cardboard.

Rabbits are becoming more and more popular as house pets these days. Still, not very many people are familiar with them as pets and prefer the more traditional cat or dog. Of the many reasons people give for having rabbits as house pets, the environment is not typically one of them. Sure, they are adorable and soft, intelligent, playful, relatively odorless, easily litter box trained and highly social animals with loads of personality (or rather rabbitality), but they're also more sustainable than cats or dogs. Don't get me wrong, I love cats and dogs but did you know that the chicken and grains that their food is made from leave rather large footprints on this planet. In fact, by some accounts your medium size dog has a larger ecological footprint than your SUV, your cat, a footprint about the size of a VW Golf.

As an alternative you might try rabbits, but before you go ahead with that option, do your homework. I know from personal experience that rabbits are a lot of work, especially when you've never had them before and are unfamiliar with their "language". Their natural behaviors are very different from cats and dogs because they are prey animals. They also like to chew anything in their path or in their way- wires, clothing, books, mail... That said, once you learn to live with them and adapt your home environment to their mischievous ways, they are delightful companions with far more intelligence than they are usually credited with. But what makes them more sustainable you ask? Here's what:

1. They are vegetarian which means their food wasn't raised on a CAFO.
2. They eat low on the food chain- grass mostly. This means not as many resources like water and fossil fuels went into growing their food as raising your cat or your dog's food.
3. They don't eat grains or meat, which means no corn or corn-fed animals went into your bunny's diet. (OK so they actually love to eat grains but it's really not good for their tummies!)
4. They eat your veggie scraps, cutting down on your trash output.
5. They are natural composters. This is no joke! They take grass and turn it into dry little pellets that do great good for your garden or composting bin. A plus side is that their poops don't stink and they have superb personal hygiene.
6. They're small so they don't eat or drink much or take up much space. Note that rabbits should spend as much time as possible outside of a cage or penned area. A hutch rabbit is a bored, sad, and lonely rabbit.
7. They won't kill the wildlife (every year cats kill billions of wild animals).


Now if you already have a cat or dog and are thinking to yourself, "I don't care what he says, I'll never get a stupid rabbit!", you're in luck because there are ways to make owning a dog or cat more sustainable, like making your own dog food with organic, sustainably grown grains and organic pastured beef and chicken.

Links to student blogs

Below are links to the blogs where students taking the course are posting their assignments and commentaries on sustainability issues. If you are a visitor and not in the course you are still welcome to follow any or all of these. In fact, we would love it if you did!

Aman- http://lalfuture.blogspot.com

Autumn- http://kaotikrevelations.blogspot.com/

Brian - http://globalcluster.blogspot.com/

Dana- http://danatrans.blogspot.com/

Danielle- http://sustainabledanielle.blogspot.com/

Ellen- http://crowdofseas.blogspot.com/

Joanna- http://sustainabilityadventure.blogspot.com/

Katie- http://journeyintosustainability.blogspot.com/

Nahela- http://nahelaa.blogspot.com/

Nora- http://norabrackbill.blogspot.com/

Phyllisia- http://gettinglittlefeet.blogspot.com

Serena- http://serenalomonico.blogspot.com

Sherbing- http://sherbingaling.blogspot.com/

Stephanie D.- http://stephdyar.blogspot.com/

Stephanie G.- http://stephgonz.blogspot.com/

Taylor- http://globalwarmingishott.blogspot.com/

Tyler- http://tylervucla.blogspot.com/

Vicki- http://sustainabilityisdanewblack.blogspot.com/

Vincent- http://livinsustainably.blogspot.com/

Yalda- http://yaldaaaaamn.blogspot.com/

Which plastics should you avoid like the plague and which should you ingest with abandon?

In an ideal and sustainable world we might be using little or no plastic but in the one we live in daily, we are surrounded by it. Encased in plastic as our lives are, we sit on it, eat out of it, write with it, walk on it, drive in it, brush our hair and teeth with it, pack gifts with it, open boxes with it, eat with it, drink with it, and not only that but also eat and drink it and that's just for starters! Yes we eat and drink plastic although hopefully not on purpose. The plastic containers you store food in and drink water from, the saran wrap you smother your leftovers with, the plastic forks and knives that purveyors of fast food provide you with, may all leach little bits of plastic into the environment, your food and drink, your body. Recently there has been more talk about what these little bits of chemicals that leach into your water from that water bottle you carry clipped on your pack or that seep into your food when heated in the microwave might do to you, and what scientists are finding is that the ubiquitous plastics we take for granted, the garbage pile of plastics we have built our daily live-in environments from may not be so good for us, may not be so benign after all. There are different types of plastics and different recipes for making them. Some may be worse than others. Some may be carcinogenic or mimic natural hormones in your body so that they disrupt function of normal processes. Of particular concern are plastics that come in contact with our food and drink. So, according to current belief, which plastics should you avoid? I'll sum it up for you here to make things simple and provide you with some links if you want to read more.

To avoid:
Containers to avoid include anything made with PVC that leeches BPA or contains known carcinogens. This means plastic #3 (most cling wraps), #6 (styrofoam cups), #7 (polycarbonates used to make those clear, hard colorful Nalgene bottles), and possibly even #1 (used in single-use water bottles, ketchup bottles, and other food packaging).

Maybe OK:
Plastic #2, 4, 5, (and maybe 1) are not currently known to leech harmful chemicals into your water or food, which isn't to say that they are OK or healthy.

Bottom line:
Avoid plastics and use stainless steel or other materials as an alternative!

Links:

http://www.plasticsinfo.org/ This is the industry website and according to them pretty much all plastics are OK. Read with a healthy amount of skepticism, and remember how the lead industry responded to good science on lead poisoning- they desperately marketed lead paint to parents using images of happy healthy children!

http://www.mindfully.org/ This website is clearly biased in the opposite direction but you have to ask yourself what their motivations are- profit or public health. They list their sources so you can decide for yourself whether they are full of truth or just full of plastic.

http://www.washingtonpost.com Journalists are supposed to be unbiased, honest, and fair right? Here's a transcript of a Q & A up on the Washington Post's site. Decide for yourself whether this is a load of plastic and you want to continue ingesting BPA.