Drakes Bay Oysters

Yesterday evening, my boyfriend and I finished off a phenomenal weekend hiking and camping in Pt. Reyes National Seashore by stopping by Drakes Bay Oyster Farm for sixty of their finest. Armed with naught but an oyster knife, a dirty t-shirt (our towel), a lemon, and some cocktail sauce, we spend the last hour of daylight cracking those babies open and slurping them down.

Drakes Bay is a pretty amazing place. It's the only sustainable oyster farm in NorCal, using no inputs, chemicals, fertilizers, or feed. Additionally, the water temperature of Drakes Estero is too cold for the non-native oysters to spawn on their own, so they must be seeded by hand, eliminating the risk of unintended invasion. The Farm also employs an off-bottom, Japanese-inspired, “hanging culture” method (like I know what that means, but it sounds good) that is used by less than 5% of U.S. oyster farmers, and results in "uniquely flavored, ultra-clean oysters." I can definitely say that these are some of the very best oysters I've had in my whole life, and we enjoyed these local, sustainable delicacies at wholesale prices right from the source. I mean, when are the last time you ate huge, perfectly delicious oysters for $0.60 a pop? Yeah, that's what I thought.

So, Bay Area readers and tourists, next time you're planning a YBG weekend of camping, hiking, sea kayaking, or whatever up in Marin County, stop by Drakes for an experience not to be missed.

PS I almost forgot to mention that Drakes Bay needs your help! The National Park Service plans to shut down the historic oyster farm in Drakes Estero, but your participation can help protect sustainable shellfish farming in Marin County. Visit www.alsamarin.org and support the campaign to SAVE DRAKES BAY OYSTER FARM by signing up and learning more about this threat.

Meet A New Favorite Website: Green Loop Apparel

I discovered Green Loop today, and I think I'm in love. Green Loop is "a style conscious, eco-retail company, specializing in sustainable apparel and accessories for men and women, grounded in good design." See that everyone! They are style-conscious and grounded in good design! No fuddy-duddy beige hemp bags or recycled patchwork skirts/shirts reminiscent of the trust-afarians lining Haight St in San Fran. No, no, no...Green Loop has really cute clothes and accessories for both men and women from designers like Simple, Grace and Cello, and jack&marjorie. While they don't always fit into the YBG budget (no, I can't afford that $1000 Vegan Queen hobo bag...but I can wish), their sale section has tons and tons of great stuff on it, like this great men's Loomstate jacket that's %50 off. Also, if you sign up for their e-newsletter, you get a coupon for %15 off your first purchase...only $850 to go on the hobo bag...

Seafood Watch 2009

Speaking of sustainable fish, I think it's important my readers know that every year Monterey Bay Aquarium puts out a free pocket guide called Seafood Watch that is "designed to raise consumer awareness about the importance of buying seafood from sustainable sources. We recommend which seafood to buy or avoid, helping consumers to become advocates for environmentally friendly seafood." The little guide easily fits in your wallet and/or purse, and if your budging wallet (full of $1 billz and change, I'm sure) can't handle anything else or you don't have the patience to wait for them to arrive in the mail, there's a new iPhone application (free, obvs) available. The Aquarium also puts out a sushi guide, which follows that same principles as the regular Seafood Watch but also lists the fish with their Japanese names.

Initially, you might feel a little "high maintenance" pulling out your SW card at a restaurant and asking the waiter, "'Scuse me, where is your yellowfin from? Oh the Atlantic? And it was pole caught? Oh then I would definitely like the seared ahi this evening?" But honestly, it's a great conversation starter, and your dinner companions will be impressed by the confidence you showed in making a sustainable decision. Doooo iiiiiit.

The REAL Cost of Farmed Salmon

It's Tuesday morning and you're mentally making your shopping list for a spin by the grocery store on the way home from work. Butter, pizza dough, toilet paper, and salmon...because you've been told that salmon is a sustainable fishery. This afternoon when you get to the store, you'll see "Fresh Farmed Atlantic Salmon $7.99" and "Frozen Wild Alaskan Salmon $10.99." So, as a YBG, you'll choose the cheaper farmed fish and be on your merry way, right? WRONG!

On the surface, it seems that farmed salmon are cheaper than wild, but when you look at the real cost of the farmed fish, it's actually much higher than the wild variety. But...I see...$3, you stutter. Well, wild salmon eat fish, but at the farms they are fed pellets of fish meal, fish oil, and added food coloring to make their flesh artificially pink. The fish meal food is made up of wild fish, and it takes 8 tons of wild fish to make up 1 ton of fish oil for their feed. Not very efficient, is it?

Also, crowded farm fish are fed antibiotics to ward off infection. In fact, farmed salmon have more antibiotics administered by weight than any other form of livestock.

Finally, Atlantic salmon are being farmed in the Pacific, and they regularly escape from their nets. Because Atlantic salmon are not native to the Pacific Ocean, when they breed with Pacific salmon, their offspring are rendered infertile further depressing wild salmon populations.

So, next time you're at the store, contemplating that $3 you could save...think again and make the right decision for yourself, salmon, and our oceans (you can put back that pint of B&J's instead, right?).

PS It is important you know that fresh wild salmon is available in the winter only. If you are eating wild salmon any other time and you bought it fresh, it had to have been previously frozen or it is not wild salmon.

A Tip for Those With LCD Computer Screens (i.e. most of us)

Well, while Blackle is all fine and good for those people who still use CRT monitors (i.e. the giant, bulbous, old-school ones), it turns out that Blackle only results in significant energy savings if your monitor is stuck in the 1990s. Most people these days have LCD screens...think laptops and flatscreens. Therefore, the best and easiest way to save a few watts on your laptops is...drumroll please...turn down your monitor's brightness! Pretty obvious, right? But, I know from experience that even smart people don't think of that simple tip. Another added bonus to reducing your screens wattage is longer battery life, so you'll be thanking me for multiple reasons next time your trying to watch Wedding Crashers, crammed into an Amtrak Coach seat on your way to NYC from DC.

Getting a Good Night's Sleep

Like I Tweeted last night, I have an hand-me-down hand-me-down mattress that was originally owned by my aunt circa 1956. Needless to say, it sucks. It is currently make somewhat bearable by the pillow top that I randomly inherited from my best friend's ex-boyfriend after college...but even with a few pillowly inches of synthetic cotton, I need a "ticket to a better night's sleep."

There are two green options for a nice but affordable mattress (cause a decent bed is expensive! and mattresses are resource intensive). Either you can look on Craigslist, or the like, for a lightly (and hopefully cleanly...ew) used mattress, thus avoiding both the consumption of resources and paying full price. Alternately, you can get a new, green mattress from Keesta without breaking the bank. According to the company, "Keetsa is committed to presenting a line of sleep products that has a minimum impact on your pocketbook and on the environment." They also get GREAT reviews on Yelp. Using organic and recycled materials, Keesta mattresses start as low as $439. Heck, and if you can get a nicely used Keesta mattress...well, then you're really in business.

I know where I'm headed this weekend.

Lightweights rule!

Last night, after getting unacceptably tipsy off of two glasses of local pinot noir (please note that I hadn't eaten dinner yet), I realized that, if reducing our consumption is the key to living a green lifestyle, then lightweight drinkers have a distinctive head start. Let's think about this...alcohol is a decidedly wasteful way to use crops, requiring lots of resources/pesticides for result that is low in nutritional value. However, it is a staple of many world cultures, and therefore, we're not going to give it up anytime soon. This means that the next best way to reduce our booze consumption while maintaining our social acceptability is by simply drinking less. And that's where lightweights win because we just can't function past a drink or three. If I can reach the same state of fuzziness with two drinks that my brother requires an entire case of Fatweisers to acquire, then, well, I'll let you do the consumption math.

This is obviously the argument I'll use at my 5th college reunion in June when being coerced into my 9th game of quarters for the evening. Right? Right.

Being Used

Who here knows about half.com and/or the used book option of amazon.com? Did you know that you can get books for half price while using none of the natural resources?! While borrowing from the library (or a friend) is obviously the greenest choice for readers, everyone has books that they have to own for one reason or another. For instance, I bought a used copy of "The Writer's Market 2009" last night because I didn't think the library would appreciate me writing/highlighting all over their copy, and I knew I'd need the book for more than a few weeks. Therefore, I searched Amazon and found a used copy of the book for 25% off. Who doesn't like a deal, and we can feel great about saving trees, water, and oil.

Putting My Codes Where My Keystrokes Are

In honor of my last post, I redesigned YBG to use less energy while you read it (i.e. changed my white background to dark green). Hope you like the redecorating!

Blackle

Ready for something super easy and free to do that will save energy? Meet Blackle, a Google search page that is black and therefore uses far less energy. According to ecoIron (a green IT firm), an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. ecoIron then did a little match to see what kind of savings we'd accrue by using Blackle vs regular old Google:

Google gets about 200+ million queries a day. Assuming each query is displayed for about 10 seconds, Google is running for approximately 550,000 hours every day all over the world. Assuming that each user runs Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background (on a CRT monitor...aka not a flatscreen) will save a total of 15 watts per view per person. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 megawatt-hours per day (8,300,000 watts/day), or about 3000 megawatt-hours per year. Now, taking into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, at $0.10 a kilowatt-hour, that's $75,000 per year, not too shabby for changing a few color codes on a single website.