Good morning. I honestly couldn’t for the life of me remember what day it was for a good while there. Cross-country travel through multiple time zones really does a number on a person.
Oh, and that whole “take the redeye, you’ll sleep and be refreshed and ready to hit the ground running at the other end” thing? It’s a complete lie.
OK, so it’s Thursday. Good morning. I might be a wee bit cranky and sleep deprived still. I’ll try not to take it out on you.
One thing about spending a lot of time around other people in public places, you realize just how much eating on the go we do. I mean, Americans eat All. The. Time. Everything is an excuse to have a snack.
I recall returning to the U.S. after living in France for a year when I was 20 and being struck by both how much food was available and connected to everything. Movies, walk in the park, street fair, road trip – all somehow became an opportunity to nosh.
And also the percentage of people who were overweight here compared to abroad, (though that ratio has been slowly changing as fast food culture becomes a global phenomenon).
All this food consumption has another negative byproduct – food waste. The U.S. generates more food waste than any other country across the globe – close to an estimated 40 million tons — or 80 billion pounds — annually, which is somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of our ENTIRE food supply.
While a growing number of communities are turning to municipal compost programs and eco-conscious residents have been doing it for years on their own (I’m looking at you, step-pop with the worms in the basement), food waste remains a big problem. In fact, it makes up about 22 percent of municipal solid waste, and takes up more room in landfills than any other sort of garbage.
We are, by nature, a culture of consumers. We like fast food and fast fashion and fast internet services and fast cars. You get the idea. All of that takes a toll on the planet in one way or another, not to mention on our overall planetary and personal health.
A contributing factor, though, is all those sell-by or use-by dates on mainstream food products sold in your average grocery store. These aren’t actually even required by federal law for anything but infant formula, though different states have regulations about things like eggs, meat, and dairy products.
Otherwise, these dates are completely made up and can readily be ignored (maybe they have more to do with liability than anything else)…except most people don’t.
I remember one memorable summer with my step-son refused to drink bottled water that had wintered over at our lake house because the date on the bottles had expired. WATER DOES NOT GO BAD, PEOPLE.
But I digress.
Then there’s the extreme opposite of the high-food-waste-generation culture – a phenomenon known as freeganism – a portmanteau of “free” and “vegan”, which, according to Wikipedia, is “an ideology of limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources, particularly through recovering wasted goods like food.”
Being a freegan is both a lifestyle and an ideology, which is, at its core, a rejection of engaging in capitalism. So a freegan might squat to avoid paying rent or a mortgage, hitchhike to avoid buying a car and gas or paying for public transportation, and dumpster dive or glean to avoid purchasing food from a store.
Dumpster diving is exactly as it sounds – eating food, much of perfectly good but day-old and unsold (often bread or pastry) or unsightly (vegetables and fruits) or past the sell-by date (meat etc. – this one you need to be careful about, because some food does spoil without refrigeration). Is this practice legal? Yes, with caveats.
There’s also something called guerrilla gardening, which involves cultivating public spaces, that is getting so poplar that even Bob Villa has something to say about it.
Once you start investigating the world of waste reduction, you find a wide range of possibilities – from nose-to-tail eating to the buy nothing movement. There are also a number of people who have publicly documented their efforts to dramatically reduce their consumption by, say, wearing the same clothes for a year or trying to generate no garbage for a year.
Maybe some of these ideas seem a little extreme to you. Perhaps you like going to the grocery store or the farmer’s market or the mall. No one is here to judge. But maybe on this Stop Food Waste Day we can all take a close look at our personal consumption habits and see if things might be able to be scaled back here or there.
We’ve got some not bad weather on tap today, with temperatures in the low 60s. Skies will be partly cloudy, and there is a slight chance of a rain shower.
In the headlines…
President Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol announced an agreement that aims to deter North Korean aggression, including a new US commitment to deploy a nuclear-armed submarine in South Korea for the first time since the early 1980s.
The new nuclear deterrence effort calls for periodically docking U.S. nuclear-armed submarines in South Korea for the first time in decades, bolstering training between the two countries, and more.
From discussing nuclear war to belting out a beloved hit: Yeol’s White House visit ended on a high note when he sang Don McLean’s “American Pie” to great applause.
The House voted to pass a bill raising the nation’s debt ceiling, after days of wrangling Republican lawmakers to unify behind the package, which would bolster Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s position at the negotiating table with the White House.
The final tally was 217-215. Four Republicans joined Democrats in voting against their party’s signature piece of legislation.
The bill’s passage comes after Republican leaders met overnight to address concerns from several GOP members, including eliminating the plan’s original aim to repeal tax credits for ethanol productions. That provision was ultimately removed.
Biden said that he is open to meeting again with McCarthy — but would not give in to the Republican’s demand for negotiations on the debt limit.
They’re not quibbling about minor points. There are stark differences in how Biden and McCarthy want to shore up the government’s finances.
The Democratic president primarily wants higher taxes on the wealthy to lower deficits; the GOP congressional leader favors sharp spending cuts.
Hunter Biden’s legal team met with prosecutors at the Justice Department to discuss potential charges against Biden, the president’s son, in the Delaware criminal investigation, two sources familiar with the matter said.
Hunter Biden’s lawyer is asking for the Treasury Department’s inspector general and the Office of Congressional Ethics to launch inquiries as part of a broader aggressive strategy to strike back at detractors of Biden’s son.
Biden dismissed polling that suggests Americans are not interested in seeing a rematch between him and former President Donald Trump, saying he has a “job to finish” in bolstering the economy and reasserting U.S. leadership abroad.
“With regard to age, I can’t even say I guess how old I am, I can’t even say the number. It doesn’t register with me,” Biden said on his age, adding that people are going to watch the campaign and judge for themselves.
Two of Trump’s defense lawyers now believe that classified briefings of phone calls with foreign leaders were among “all manner of documents” that Trump returned to the National Archives after he left the presidency, according to a new letter sent to Congress.
At the top of Trump’s so-called retribution list is re-instituting an executive order known as “Schedule F,” which would reclassify tens of thousands of federal employees involved in policy decisions as at-will employees.
Trump has lost an emergency attempt to block former Vice President Mike Pence from testifying about their direct conversations, in the latest boost to a federal criminal investigation examining Trump’s and others’ actions after the 2020 election.
The 11th-hour ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia paved the way for Pence to appear before the federal grand jury as early as this week.
E. Jean Carroll testified in a Manhattan courtroom, relating a harrowing story of being raped by Trump in the mid-1990s, as the former president — who declined to attend the trial — railed at her on social media, infuriating the judge overseeing the case.
“I’m here because Donald Trump raped me,” Carroll told the jury. “And when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen. He lied and shattered my reputation. And I’m here to try to get my life back.”
The judge in the civil trial of Carrol’s rape allegation against Trump sharply criticized comments by the former president on social media about an hour before the trial resumed yesterday morning.
Disney filed a First Amendment lawsuit against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and a five-member board that oversees government services at Disney World in federal court, claiming “a targeted campaign of government retaliation.”
The Justice Department filed a lawsuit challenging Tennessee’s recent ban on certain healthcare for transgender minors, arguing the law violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection.
As Republicans move to limit gender-transitioning treatments, a sustained veto in Kansas, a judge’s order in Missouri and federal intervention in Tennessee have emerged as barriers.
Montana’s House voted to bar a transgender Democratic lawmaker from participating in debate from the legislature floor a week after she spoke out against a bill that would ban gender-affirming therapies for minors. She will be able to vote remotely.
Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of posting classified documents online, repeatedly tried to obstruct federal investigators and has a “troubling” history of making racist and violent remarks, Justice Department lawyers said.
A little known, Colorado-based Democratic operative named Adam Sullivan holds deep influence over Gov. Kathy Hochul, her administration and campaign team, even as skepticism mounts over his judgment and distance from New York.
The state budget is nearly a month late but lawmakers are nearing an end to their negotiations without Hochul’s top priority — a comprehensive housing plan that set a goal to build 800,000 new units.
“We’re going to go back,” Hochul told reporters in the wake of divided housing negotiations. “This is just the beginning of a journey. We’re going to work on this until we solve this.”
A tentative agreement to raise New York’s minimum wage to as much as $17 in the coming years has drawn critics from both sides of the aisle.
Hochul and state lawmakers are nearing a deal to increase the state’s hourly minimum wage to $17 and tie future increases to inflation, though progressives say it doesn’t go far enough and are launching a last-ditch effort to push it higher.
Republicans in the state Senate and Assembly urged Hochul to allow for ample time to review any finalized state budget agreement and not rush the process when a deal is finally struck.
There must be either a finalized budget agreement in place or approve a sixth temporary extension of state spending by next Tuesday in order to avoid disrupting state employees paychecks on May 4, state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli said.
Lawmakers commenced a legislative conversation about how to strike the right balance in preparing students for an active school shooting incident without perpetuating a cycle of fear.
Hochul is reportedly proposing the state cover the multimillion-dollar cost of housing 22 new charter schools in New York City to help silence critics of the expansion.
The Democratic-led state Assembly this week advanced a measure that would restrict the use of neonicotinoid pesticides in New York in order to encourage pollinators like bees considered key to ecology.
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, facing the possibility of paying millions of the dollars to the state, is suing New York’s new ethics commission and alleging that it is so independent from the current governor it is unconstitutional.
A bipartisan bill to rename the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge the Tappan Zee Bridge bit the dust in the state Assembly this week.
Mayor Eric Adams unveiled New York City’s $106.7 billion budget for fiscal year 2024 – the largest executive budget in city history – saying it’s so high due to surging costs to pay for asylum seekers, new labor deals and inflation.
“We must budget wisely in crafting the executive budget. We face a substantial challenge funding 10-billion-dollars over the course of two fiscal years,” said Adams.
Adams announced that he would exempt New York City’s public libraries from his latest round of threatened budget cuts, sparing them from closing many of their branches on weekends.
The fiscal year 2024 executive budget that Adams and the city’s top budget officials unveiled yesterday suggested that the administration isn’t dead set on seeing through those 4% cuts fully – at least not for all agencies.
Jimmy Oddo, former Staten Island borough president, will be appointed commissioner of the New York City Department of Buildings, according to two sources familiar with the decision.
Adams slammed critics of the NYPD’s overtime spending during his executive budget rollout, suggesting that those who fixate so much on the fiscal outlay are either “anti-overtime” or “anti-police.”
Adams joined top FDNY and NYPD brass at the Fire Academy on Randall’s Island this week to showcase new technology the department called “instrumental” when responding to the garage collapse in the Financial District last week.
The use of the robotic “digidog” in a real-world emergency – the Manhattan parking garage collapse – gave Adams a chance to restate his interest in using technology for public-safety purposes.
Three chiefs at the center of the ongoing turmoil at the FDNY spoke publicly for the first time this week, calling on the Mayor to step in and heal the rift between Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh and the department’s top brass.
A prominent Harlem business group filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the state from building a recreational cannabis dispensary on the neighborhood’s main street, adding to the challenges faced by the state in its rollout of the recreational marijuana industry.
MTA Chair Janno Lieber rejected a key feature from a new proposal to overhaul Penn Station, saying the pitch would be another public handout to Madison Square Garden owner James Dolan.
Working at a New York City farmers’ market is not as idyllic as it might seem, employees say. Now they are unionizing, and their employer will recognize their unit.
New York City’s beach season kicks off next month — but the top parks officials said the department is still struggling to find enough lifeguards for the second year in a row.
Legendary showbiz haunt the Friars Club is going up for sale amid a major debt crisis.
Three-term Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano has so many family members on the city payroll that the locality could be renamed Spano Inc., critics charge. There are at least 14 Spano relatives on the city municipal payroll totaling $2 million, Lohud.com reported.
Boosted by major sports competitions and facilities upgrades including a zipline and a Cliffside Coaster ride, the Olympic Regional Development Authority set a new record this past year logging more than a million visits for the fiscal year ending March 31.
Sunmark Credit Union has launched a lending program that allows members to finance their solar energy installation with fixed loan payments, the organization announced.
Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon, freshly ousted from their perches at top cable networks, have hired the same powerhouse lawyer to navigate their exits: Prominent Hollywood attorney Bryan Freedman.
Carlson spoke out last night, posting a two-minute video on Twitter where he criticized the level of debate on television shows and said there are few places where truth is told.
Private messages sent by Carlson that had been redacted in legal filings showed him making highly offensive remarks that went beyond the comments of his prime-time show.
The elimination of the blue check marks that helped authenticate accounts on Twitter has convulsed a platform that once seemed indispensable for following breaking news.
