This country is so far ahead of us in so many ways. It makes me feel like we put on a front, pretending that we care so much about recycling, the environment, organic food, free-range meats—but really, how much do we care when we don’t make things mandatory? When we keep recycling an optional thing that one can do if he or she is a 'conscientious' citizen? Or give people the option to buy free-range beef instead of demanding that all cows be free range?
The cashier chuckled at me as I was checking out of the grocery store for the first time. I said very casually that I would like everything bagged, please. After having her laugh, she explained that plastic bags here cost money—22 cents a bag to be exact. She said my best bet was to buy some of the canvas bags and use them again and again. And thankfully she was a sweetheart, and let me have one plastic bag for free just because I looked so lost and confused.
Yesterday Roger and I took a run around the city, and we ended up at our school’s gym. (Sidebar: It is the most gorgeous gym I have ever been in: one room for weights, one hallway for bikes, one hallway for rowing machines, a whole room with cardio equipment (and TVs on every single one), a weight gym just for women, a massive and amazing looking rock wall, indoor pool, dance studio, sprint track, etc…) But we arrived sweaty, red-faced, and dehydrated—majorly dehydrated. We figured we’d just mosey around the gym and find a drinking fountain. Well, that turned out to be much easier said than done. We searched long and hard, and we didn’t find a single drinking fountain. Instead, they have machines that pour the water in from the top (so you can fill your water bottle). This must be the country of Nalgene and Sigg.
My apartment comes with three separate trashcans—as does every apartment in my building: one for compost, one for recyclables, and one for general waste. UVM is probably the only school in America that (maybe) does something like that, and everyone I’m sure considers them really hippy for it. But here its compulsory and second nature.
During our cooking class, Roger was asking our instructor questions about which meats were the healthiest, and he said he assumed that chicken would be healthier than beef. Wrongo. Apparently here there are strict regulations on beef (I believe the regulations are that it must be free-range and eat organic food) because there was some sort of cow epidemic a few years ago. (?) I need to find out what happened; I’m awfully curious. But anyway, the instructor said that chicken can also be found free-range and organic, but we need to make sure to check for that. All I could think of was the Primo menu (I suppose because I saw about a hundred variations of it this summer), which would read “Free-Range Beef”.
In the States, free-range meat is something that is particularly costly. Really, only the more well off people can afford to care about whether or not their meat is free-range. To lots of people, it just means that it costs more money for the same meat. But what if we didn’t give the farmers an option—if all meats had to be free-range and organic just because it is healthier, and far more humane? And, at least as far as I can tell, meat here doesn’t appear to cost more than meat at home. I have a feeling that would be the big argument at home: “It costs too much to make it mandatory because not all farmers can afford it, and not all people can afford more expensive meat.” But it looks like before we can say that, we need to look at a different model and see how other places are doing it. Because they are, and we aren’t. And it’s about time that we caught up.
Oh, one more thing. The bikes that I talked about in my last entry...How often do we talk about reducing our emissions, taking public transportation or biking instead of taking separate cars everywhere? So why don’t we have bike lanes? Why don’t we have a system set up in Boston and New York to have people pay for a bike rental program? I found out how it actually works. People pay ten euro to be part of the program for the year, and then they get a swipe card that they can use to unlock the bike racks. They can borrow a bike for up to a half hour, and then they have to return it to another rack. But they are free to take out another bike if they aren’t finished yet. And then, of course, there are pretty intense fees if you are late, and if you are 24 hours late you have to pay something like 250 euro for the bike itself.
I lied; I thought of something else. Sort of in a different vein, yet just as important—the university here has a child-care program. I have no idea how it works, but from what I gather, it is a program run by the Student Union to provide university students with free child-care so that they can attend classes. In the States, I feel like young mothers are scoffed at. And the general consensus seems to be that if they are irresponsible enough to have children at such a young age, they probably don’t want to go to school. It’s infuriating.
There is no reason we couldn’t set it up as a volunteer program. Colby kids, and I’m sure college kids around the country, love to do volunteer work. So set up a program where those volunteer hours aren’t spent at the local food market or pretending like you are helping at an elementary school, but, instead, they are spent helping someone literally change the trajectory that their life will take.
That is plenty of ranting for ten in the morning on a Sunday. (A fifteen minute song of church bells dragged me out of my cozy bed so early.)
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