New Paper on Global Data-Driven Climate Actions

Local experience is not always generalizable. But, you sum up research on a bunch of places, and then patterns emerge. In Data-Driven Climate Action (for Los Angeles) I said:

In summary, decarbonizing transportation has the highest potential for stopping Climate Change, but it requires collective action. We can’t choose to bike along a street that doesn’t create a safe space for us or take a bus to an evening concert if the buses don’t operate at night. An urban area is precisely where these two modes can excel, if we let them. We don’t need a solution that works in Iowa or New Hampshire or even Fresno. We have the existing density and the weather to do this right here, right now. Let’s paint those streets Green (bike lane) & Red (bus lane).

A recent meta-analysis by Diana Ivanova, John Barrett, Dominik Wiedenhofer, Biljana Macura, Max W Callaghan and Felix Creutzig, examined

6,990 records in the Web of Science Core Collections and Scopus. Searches were restricted to 1) reviews of lifecycle assessment studies and 2) multiregional input-output studies of household consumption, published after 2011 in English. We selected against pre-determined eligibility criteria and quantitatively synthesized findings from 53 studies in a meta-review. We identified 771 original options, which we summarized and presented in 61 consumption options with a positive mitigation potential.

They really did their homework on a global scale.  Climate mitigation measures were broadly separated into transportation, food, housing and other.  The combined findings are plotted together on a single box and whiskers chart.

The findings for each study are plotted with circles.  The extreme values are marked with "whiskers" at the end of the bars showing the full range of values. The 25th and 75th percentiles bound the "box". The average value is marked with a large X. The median is marked with a vertical line. 

For context, we need to reduce global CO2 productions by 55% to limit climate change to a global average of 1.5℃ (We've already warmed up 0.8℃ and 1.0℃ is already baked in due to past emissions alone.)  That means each person on earth can contribute 2.1 tCO2eq/cap (metric tons of CO2 or equivalent of emissions  per capita per year.) Americans and Australians contribute 16.7 and 16.2 tCO2eq/cap of emissions.

Note that some of the mitigation strategies can cause negative reductions or increases in CO2 emissions. The authors call that rebound--when the cure is worse than the disease.

The biggest difference that we can make, with the least cost and risk, is to live car-free. I get a lot of eye-rolling, mainly from older people in the US, when I mention this. We are apparently so exceptional in the US that physics and logic could simply not apply to us.

We know how this worked out for COVID-19. Ignore scientists and the results are apparent in a few weeks.

We have been telling you to get out of your car to save the planet for decades, and the result is so slow-moving, that we've been ignored or told we are crazy.

Physics and viruses don't care. They do what they are going to do.

Here's a closer look at just the transportation sector. See the range of values for "Live car-free?" The extreme high value is for ditching an SUV, which also happens to be the most popular car style in America. Losing the family SUV is a huge savings of about 3.6 metric tons of CO2 per capita per year.

I can already hear the, "Yes, but" crowd pointing to the Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV).  Don't they offer almost as much CO2 reduction?

The answer is maybe.  Notice that a significant chunk of the data points for BEV fall in the pink, rebound area, where they cause a net INCREASE in CO2 emissions.  E.g. the BEV is charged with fossil fuel-generated electricity or other externalities that cause other emissions to go up.  Los Angeles falls in the pink area for the reasons I explained in Data-Driven Climate Action (for Los Angeles).

Notice Fuel Cell Vehicles (FCVs) at the bottom?  Hydrogen fuel cells get a lot of hype, but don't save CO2 emissions and they run a huge rebound risk.

I've been accused of confirmation bias because I keep pointing to cars as the culprit for so many ills.  Look at the data.  The biggest bang for the buck is to reduce the distances that you travel, and then travel in the most environmentally-light way.  Walk, bike,  eBike, eScooter, transit, carpool, drive a fuel-efficient car (small and/or hybrid, or BEV.)

Our family made the calculation that, a BEV would be a fine SECOND car, but not our ONLY car.  We drive to SF visit family and have seen the waits to use the fast chargers on Interstate 5.  We also like to take family car trips to remote places with no BEV chargers.

I have seen the South Bay CCOG statistics of car ownership.  I've seen the Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) data for Los Angeles county.  In the relatively affluent South Bay, there is about one car per licensed driver.  We have 1 car for 3 drivers. We've essentially taken 2 cars off the road compared to our neighbors.

By having only one car, and making it a fuel-efficient hybrid, our entire family has had to learn how go about our daily routines without a car.  This leads to non-linear savings.  If you always have a car available to you, you use it.  If you can't count on having a car available, then you learn to make most of your trips without a car.

Learning to live "car-light" saves us money, reduces air & water pollution, mitigates climate change, reduces competition for parking spaces in our neighborhood and forces us to get more exercise.  Those are all very positive outcomes and does not require us to wait for a build-out of BEV charging infrastructure.

Ivanova et al strikes an optimistic note.  If you just do the top 10 changes, we make substantial global progress.

The top consumption options (by medians) include substantial changes in car travel (living car-free, shifting to electric vehicles and public transport), air travel reductions, use of renewable electricity and more sustainable heating (renewable-based heating and heat pump), refurbishment and renovation, a shift to a plant-based diet and improved cooking equipment. The top 10 consumption options together (accounting for the overlap of car travel alternatives) yield an average annual mitigation potential of 9.2 tCO2eq/cap. While crudely estimated, this indicates a substantial mitigation potential of already available low-carbon consumption options towards achieving the 1.5-2°C target.

Make the changes that you can, given the society that we live in. Then organize to create a society where more of us can make choices that are better for the planet. We collectively built the auto-centric landscape in the past 70 years. We can collectively rebuild it.

Sea People

Bad Dad leads the {pages} non-fiction book club at {pages} a bookstore and we read Sea People by Christina Thompson two months ago.

Sea People is an absolute delight and you can read my review on Goodreads.

This book was written specifically for me.*

It tells the story of how the Lapita people, originally from the island of Taiwan (my two grandmothers,) sailed the vast Pacific ocean and settled an area that covers 25% of the earth's surface.

Even if you don't have Lapita grandmothers, read it for the detective story, natural science, history and anthropology. There is something for everyone.

It's written in an accessible and sympathetic style, with a well-annotated notes/bibliography section in the end for those who want to read deeper.

* IRL, I have a high affinity for nonlinear dynamics, climatology, winds and currents. A book that includes not just my grandmothers' history, but 'insertion points' into the Pacific, El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and paleoclimate could not be better designed for my interests.

Thompson writes with empathy and good humor, but you have to laugh at some of the whacky ideas white people have about people who aren't white.  Speaking of which, I ran across a couple of science stories about the people of Easter Island, which completely skewer Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.

DiNapoli et al showed that the moai monuments on Easter Island are mostly markers for freshwater seeps.  The larger and more reliable the freshwater source, the larger the monument.

• Rapa Nui (Easter Island) monument (ahu) locations explained by freshwater sources paper at Plos One.
• Smithsonian synopsis for lay people

Moia picture from Smithsonian article credited to Adwo/Fotolia

That explains most of the moai.  Some of the inland ones were discovered to be very large time-release fertilizer stakes. Quarrying stone for Easter Island statues made soil more fertile for farming.

Researchers traditionally have assumed that builders of the island’s partially buried quarry statues had either planned to move them elsewhere on the island or abandoned them. Designs on the roughly 6.6-meter-tall quarry statues display similarities to those on the only other Rapa Nui statue displaying numerous carved images. That carved figure was previously found at a ceremonial site nearly 20 kilometers west of the quarry.

Although the quarry measures only about 800 to 1,000 meters across, the new soil data show that it was a “little productive gold mine” for farming, says archaeologist Christopher Stevenson of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, who did not participate in the study. Reeds growing in a lake at the base of the quarry would have provided additional phosphorus to the soil, he says.

“The area immediately to the east of the quarry was and is one of the most intensively settled parts of the island, and now that makes much more sense,” Stevenson says.

Organic =/= Sustainable

I cringe every time I read someone call organic cotton sustainable.  It uses so much more land and water.  Natural dyes can double the amount of land required to produce fabric.

I know that I can never convert the die-hard purists, but they are probably not reading this blog anyway.

Technology Review (MIT's Alumni magazine) sums up the current state of our knowledge, Sorry—organic farming is actually worse for climate change.

Organic practices can reduce climate pollution produced directly from farming – which would be fantastic if they didn’t also require more land to produce the same amount of food.

Clearing additional grasslands or forests to grow enough food to make up for that difference would release far more greenhouse gas than the practices initially reduce, a new study in Nature Communications finds.

I've written ad nauseum about how organic cotton uses more water, which is scarce in many of the arid regions where the highest quality cotton is grown, like in my home region of the US Southwest.  Irrigation with groundwater has left the soil so salty that crops can not grow. 

(Alfalfa is grown in the desert because it will tolerate salty soil and water.)

Genetically modified cotton grows with half the water as organic cotton, and it can tolerate salty soil.  You can use the organic practices of crop rotation, cover crops and compost/manure and combine it with technology in a responsible way. 

For instance, GMO Bt cotton manufactures its own protection against cotton borers and bollworms.  In fact, the higher the salt content of the soil, the more pesticides the plant produces.  Bt cotton is sold with and without resistance to Round-up.  Most of the seeds are sold with resistance to both, but that doesn't mean farmers are spraying Round-up willy nilly.

Most farmers are smart enough not to spray chemicals that they don't need.  If weeds are not a problem in that field in that year, then they won't spray.

Small-scale organic farm are laboratories where farmers can test novel ways to grow crops.  Scientists in labs can also develop and test new crops. Then we can combine the best of both approaches.

I read that only 1% of US-grown cotton is organic, while 15-16% (and climbing) are grown from GMO seeds and unsprayed.  It's sometimes sold as "clean cotton" or "better cotton" and purchased by IKEA and Uniqlo.

I read laments by younger sewists on blogs and Instagram that they are sorry they can't afford to sew with organic fabrics.  That saddens me.  We don't have enough planets for everyone to go fully organic.  But we can blend the best of organic practices with technology for a sustainable future for everyone--not just the rich.

Wear polyester if you like

I read Sewing Eco-Guilt? Killer! and groaned. I left a comment but it didn't appear so I'm leaving my response here.

I'm a scientist and I don't care if you wear polyester or organic hemp as long as you curtail driving and flying (and eat less beef.)

I don't even care if your car is electric.  I just want you out of a car.

Yes, polyester is made of fossil fuels, but at least it's sequestered in your blouse. Nothing degrades in a landfill, polyester and natural fibers alike.  The important thing is to cut down on our consumption.

I wrote a blog series about sustainability and sewing.  It has links to actual data.

Organic Pesticides Redux

I'm cleaning up a lot of open browser tabs and finishing some blog posts stuck in draft mode limbo.  I may have mentioned that I was elected an executive director for League of Women Voters of Los Angeles County.  My portfolio/niche is to monitor governmental happenings in air/water quality and climate change for LA County.  I am learning a ton, and will share some of what I learn here.

However, I want to make clear that this blog is and will remain a personal blog.  My views do not necessarily reflect those of the LWVLAC as a whole (though I joined them because we have similar views.)

I mentioned in Heavy Metal in LA that our region grapples with unsafe levels of copper in creeks and estuaries.  This led me to learn about the sources of copper.  In this urban environment, it's almost entirely cars and the people who drive them.

Copper-Impaired Waterbodies in the Los Angeles Basin

I mentioned in passing that there are no kale farms nearby and no one took the bait.  Did you know that kale, both organic and conventional, is laden with copper?  Read Organic Pesticides: Not An Oxymoron.  Also look at this Texas A&M extension list of fungicides used in kale production.

All kale gets sprayed--but it is sprayed with different stuff based on how it will be marketed.  According to this list, Copper Hydroxide and Cuprous Oxide is sprayed on organic kale.  Copper Sulfate is sprayed on conventional kale.  Whichever you buy, wash it well, with a bit of detergent to remove residue.

Christie Wilcox wrote in Scientific American blog back in 2012:

In head-to-head comparisons, natural pesticides don't fare any better than synthetic ones. When I compared the organic chemicals copper sulfate and pyrethrum to the top synthetics, chlorpyrifos and chlorothalonil, I found that not only were the organic ones more acutely toxic, studies have found that they are more chronically toxic as well, and have higher negative impacts on non-target species. My results match with other scientific comparisons. In their recommendations to Parliament in 1999, the Committee on European Communities noted that copper sulfate, in particular, was far more dangerous than the synthetic alternative. A review of their findings can be seen in the table on the right (from a recent review paper). Similarly, head to head comparisons have found that organic pesticides aren't better for the environment, either.

I don't know why Wilcox's list and the TAMU list disagree on whether conventional or organic get CuSO4 salt.  Whatever.  In water, the salt breaks down into Cu++ ions and messes up the flora and fauna that grow in and near the water bodies.

I hope we get beyond the organic vs non-organic wars and farm in a sustainable, regenerative way that is healthier for the land, farmers and consumers.

In Sustainable Organic Pesticides, I mentioned that the active ingredients of Neem tree oil can be synthesized in laboratories, which reduces the amount of land and water needed for pest control.  The same is also true for pyrethrins, the active insecticide ingredient in marigolds.

My mother used to grow a border of marigolds around the perimeter of her vegetable garden. I found the odor of the plants unpleasant and frequently felt ill around them. Later, I found out that I am allergic to ragweed and marigolds.  The CDC recommends that "Pyrethrins generally should not be used by persons who are allergic to chrysanthemums or ragweed."

Look up at the table of things that are sprayed on kale. Yup. Organic kale is a transgenic Frankenfood that includes ground up bits of marigolds that can trigger an allergic reaction. I still eat kale, but wash it thoroughly.

Which gets me back to the hysteria about GMOs and the organic wars. The Environmental Working Group's (EWG) Dirty Dozen list comes from their tests for residues of conventional pesticides on produce purchased at a variety of markets and before washing.

EWG does not test for pesticides used in organic farming.  There are a lot of them.

It's not a complete measure of all the risks.  It underestimates the risks by not testing for organic pesticides.  It also overestimates the risk because much of the residue washes off.

EWG rightfully points out that there is wide variation in how thoroughly people wash produce.  Their samples also varied depending on where they bought the produce.  Their measured pesticide load is not your pesticide exposure--it's a proxy that may or may not represent your actual exposure.

I give you another exhibit in organic vs organic wars, the cherry-picked study designed to give you the answer you want. When this article came out, the headlines all echoed "Organic diet intervention significantly reduces urinary pesticide levels in U.S. children and adults."

This is both a 'duh' type study as the conclusion is not surprising, but it's also one that can cause a great deal of stress and anxiety for those that cannot feed their children an 100% organic diet.

The experimental setup and data shows a more nuanced picture.  I want to parse the results to some context.

Firstly, they sought volunteers in neighborhoods that do not have a lot of organic choices and selected volunteers that reported not eating much organic food before the study period.  They followed 16 people in four cities, basically about one family in each city.  This is a very small sample size.

Their urine was tested for a bunch of metabolites of pesticides.  (Chemicals often break down in your body into smaller/related chemicals called metabolites.)

They tested only for pesticides used in conventional farming.  They did not test for any chemicals used in organic farming.  They tested for and found one metabolite that can originate from either organic or conventional pesticides.  More on that later.

It's hard to eat 100% organic when you eat out or don't cook entirely from scratch at home--the way most of us eat.  In this experiment, the researchers did 100% of the shopping and food prep, going as far as delivering meals to the homes of the subjects (and even packing lunches for them to take to work or school.)

Study participants need only heat and serve the prepared meals.  I would have liked the study to give the families organic ingredients and cook their own meals their own way, but I can understand why they didn't.  A study this small can't afford to have any confounding factors like how thoroughly cooks wash produce or whether the water they are washing with already has pesticides in it.

Short of plucking everyone out of their home environments and sequestering them, this was the best way of ensuring that they complied with the strict 100% organic diet.

The results are just what you expected, with a few surprises.  Take a look at the table of detection frequencies (DF).  The DFs went UP for a couple of metabolites/analytes after they switched from a conventional to organic diet!

Detection Frequency of analyzed chemicals in urine samples of test subjects on conventional and 100% organic diets.

However, the concentrations of pesticide metabolites went down overall.  It was quite dramatic (down 95%) for some chemicals, which is reassuring because that means that our bodies quickly expel those chemicals rather than keeping it in our tissues.

Urinary analyte concentrations (ng/mL) & percent change from conventional to organic diet.

This is where the nuance comes in.  The amount of chemicals related to pyrethroid insecticides did not go down as much as for the other chemicals. The authors conjectured that it is because those insecticides are used around the house as well as on crops.

If your kids came home with head lice, you would probably use a product with pyrethroid compounds before the school would allow your child to return.  If you live in tick country, you'd put it on before heading into the woods.

Remember the people who did not have detectable levels of trans-DCCA (a pyrethroid metabolite) when eating a conventional diet but then did have it when eating an organic diet?  That means they did not get exposed to pyrethroid compounds from their homes or their conventional diet.  (Or the levels they had in their urine fluctuated day to day, but their overall level was very low.)

The detection frequencies of trans-DCCA and cis-DCCA went up after switching to the organic diet.  That strongly suggests that they probably got the pyrethroid insecticide exposure from the organic food, not from their homes as the authors suggested.

Read the author statements and the funding source of this study to learn why the experimental design and data interpretation has these flaws.

Whether it is permethrin from a lab or pyrethrin from marigolds, it's hard to avoid some chemicals because of their ubiquity.

BTW, just because something is detectable, doesn't mean it is unsafe.  The reverse is true.  We don't have good tests for some dangerous things.

Once I realized that this is not just a blog where I post pictures of my sewing and knitting projects, I decided to be a voice of reason that and to help dispel the mommy wars.  You are not a bad mommy just because you don't have the time or money to serve your kids 100% organic diets.

I learned this level of detail because I have a BS in Chemistry and am allergic to ragweed.  Whether my veggies are organic or conventional, I wash them (or at least rinse them when in a hurry.)  Am I getting all of it off?  Probably not.  But, perfect is the enemy of done.  As long as I can eat the veggies and not have a sore, scratchy throat afterwards, it's good enough.

It's good to ask questions about your food.  But let's focus on the big picture.  Buy real food, wash it well, eat your veggies.

Towards a better wardrobe

Kate at the Time to Sew blog (@timetosew on IG) asked me what I think about the arguments presented by Nina Marenzi on the Wardrobe Crisis podcast.  I listened to the entire 36 minute podcast just so I can hear a few minutes of scientific tidbits.

(Why are podcasts so popular?  Are we being gas-lit about the popularity of podcasts the same way FB lied about the popularity of video news?  Don't busy people want more info in less time?)

Nina Marenzi made some good points, but, there wasn't an opportunity for her to address the issues deeply in 36 minutes (!) while establishing rapport (talking about childhood pets) and establishing culture cred (music), etc.

Anyhoo...

In short, she said that we have a crisis of topsoil.  We are in danger of using up all of the world's topsoil in 60 years unless we change the way we do things.  You get no argument from me on that one.

Then we hit an uh-oh, when she segued into organic agriculture and biodynamic farming.  We use labels as cognitive shorthand; organic is supposed to represent a sustainable way of farming.  It's true that, on average, organic farmer tends to be kinder to the environment than conventional agriculture.  But, if you have been reading my blog, you know that organic is no panacea.

One problem is that organic farming does not necessarily preserve topsoil.  The opening chapters of Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, deal with how organic lettuce at Whole Foods is grown in northern California.

 The land is tilled, watered and weeds  are allowed to grow. Then they plow the weeds under and repeat the process. Fewer weeds should sprout the second time.  After plowing the weeds under a second time, they actually grow the lettuce.

They follow this wasteful practice in lieu of hand weeding because they simply do not have enough labor to hand weed the enormous acreage required to feed our demand for organic lettuce.

The damage wrought by that organic lettuce is enormous. They lost topsoil with each tilling. They pumped groundwater from a critically overdrafted aquifer to grow two crops of weeds and one crop of lettuce. Along the way, they used up 57 calories of fossil fuels to produce 1 calorie of arugula.

(That is not counting the energy for you to go shop for the arugula and get it home.  I sound like a broken record, but the biggest change you can make is how you (and your stuff) get around.  An electric car sitting in traffic is still another car in traffic.  Get out of your car already.)

Read Organic Pesticides: Not An Oxymoron for an idea of what I am talking about. The problem with EWG's Dirty Dozen is that they only test for synthetic pesticides (the ones not used in organic farming.)  No one is routinely testing for pesticides used in organic farming that can be hazardous to the environment, farm workers, and consumers.

Why You Shouldn't Buy Organic Based on the "Dirty Dozen" List [Updated for 2019]

The “Dirty Dozen” list, which aims to rank the fruits with the most pesticide residue, comes from the Environmental Working Group, and they publish their methodology on the report’s website. They basically download the test results from the USDA’s Pesticide Data Program, which samples produce for pesticide residues, and come up with a ranking score for each fruit or vegetable based on six criteria relating to the number of different pesticide residues seen on produce of that type, the percentage of samples with pesticide residues, and the total amount of pesticide detected.

There’s a problem here. Some pesticides are drastically more toxic than others, but the EWG’s scoring system considers all pesticides to be equal, and they don’t relate the pesticide amounts to known safety standards. Two food scientists did a reality check on the EWG’s numbers from their 2010 list (which uses the same methodology as this year’s). Their analysis was published in the Journal of Toxicology.

They compared the amount of pesticides on each of the Dirty Dozen foods to the chronic reference dose, which is the maximum amount that it’s okay to have if you are eating that food every day of your life. This level, just to be safe, is one hundred times less than the amount that experimental animals were able to consume with no effects. It’s a pretty big safety margin. So how many of the Dirty Dozen exceeded this extremely conservative chronic reference dose? None:

You should read the entire well-researched article.  Author Beth Skwarecki echoes the points chemist and farmer friends have made to me.  It's preferable to buy from a farmer that sprays glyphosate once than from a farmer that sprays organic pesticides repeatedly.  Insects can develop resistance to any pesticide, organic or synthetic.  It's the repeated spraying that breeds pesticide resistance--superbugs and superweeds.

A friend says that he sprays glyphosate once per growing season.  It makes a big difference in his farm's yield and water use.  His orchard is too big to weed manually.  But the glyphosate plus manual weeding of stragglers is working for him, even though he can't sell his fruit as organic.

Did you know that in some parts of India, the chickpea borer has become such a big problem, that farmers cannot grow one of their primary sources of protein?  The best hope for these farmers is to grow BT chickpeas, which are resistant to the borer.  I'm not going to tell a farmer that they are better off starving than using GM technology.

That flexible approach to production that uses technology to improve efficiency while being safer for the environment, the people working in agriculture, and the consumers.

Let's get back to the podcast.  Marenzi made solid points about how we should expand our market basket of fibers beyond cotton and polyester.

She said that polyester makes up 70% of the fiber in global clothing production.  Cotton makes up ~23% and all other fibers make up about 7%.

She said that we should use more linen and hemp, which grow readily with little chemical input and can grow on more marginal land.  One of the big problems with cotton is that it uses up topsoil and water at alarming rates.  It also requires good quality land and fresh water.  GMO cotton can be engineered to grow in soils and with water that contains more salts than organic cotton can tolerate.  In a world with 7 billion people (and growing), we need fiber crops that don't compete with food crops for land and water.

They talked about fiber shedding in laundering and the amount of fibers that end up in the oceans and waterways.  Acrylic sheds the most fibers of all.  I expected cotton and natural fibers to also shed and find their way into the water.  But I did not expect them to persist.  After all, they are biodegradable.  I thought wrong.  The oceans are full of small fibers, natural and synthetic.

This makes me glad that I live in Los Angeles, where our waste water is screened, treated and micro-filtered at a minimum.  Some are even nano-filtered or undergo reverse osmosis and UV treatment to make them potable again.

She mentioned the grave and irreversible damage done by cashmere production that I chronicled in The planetary cost of cashmere.

They discussed problems with viscose/rayon production.  Marenzi noted that viscose/rayon isn't the problem so much as the production process.  You have to soak the cellulosic fibers in strong chemicals to break up the fibers and then use more chemicals to get them to reform into fibers suitable for spinning into yarn.  Wikipedia on rayon has a good summary of the processes.

They mentioned the water use in viscose/rayon production, but didn't mention that the water footprint of viscose/rayon is based on the assumption that the water used in production is released into waterways and diluted to safe levels of toxicity.  That's not what really happens.  No one has uses that much water to dilute the effluent.  Many producers just release it into waterways and let downstream users deal with the pollution.  That happens often in countries with little oversight and laws.

More responsible manufacturers recycle the chemicals and water (with high-tech equipment and applying lots of energy) in a closed loop process.  Manufacturers that use closed loop processes label sell their products under the Lyocell, Tencel or Ecovero labels.  Ambiance Bemberg rayon also uses a closed loop process.  Please support these manufacturers as I do.  They cost a little more for the consumer because they are not foisting the environmental costs to others.

Marenzi also said that 80% of organic cotton grown today is rain-fed.  This is a positive development, but it's too late for the Aral Sea region or the Murray Darling River.

The Aral Sea in 2000 on the left and 2014 on the right. Photograph: Atlas Photo Archive/NASA

She also said that organic cotton is a cash crop grown in rotation with food crops by subsistence farmers in many parts of the world.  I wish the higher yields and lower water requirements of GMO cleaner cotton were available to the subsistence farmers.  This could happen if we made GMO seeds less costly and if we as consumers were willing to pay more for cleaner cotton.  (Farmers in poor countries are only being paid more for organic cotton but we can change that.)

I'm encouraged that the Gates Foundation is investing in GMO research so that farmers in poor countries will be able to take advantage of GMO's advantages without having to pay exorbitant and unfair Monsanto prices.

Anyway, I thought the podcast was a long slog and made some good points but it was a poor investment of my time.  For most people, reading is the fastest way to ingest information.

Thank-you for reading and I hope I didn't take up 36 minutes of your life.

Put down that almond milk

The news about almonds gets worse and worse. In 2015, Mother Jones exposed that almond groves used up more water in California than the residents of LA and SF combined. Almonds made up 17% of all irrigated farm land in CA and used up 10% of CA irrigation water used for food crops.

Almond apologists countered that almonds are highly nutritious and that their water use should be weighed against their nutritional and economic values.  The Almond Board of California (an industry group) hired researchers at UC Davis and CSU Sacramento to study the water footprint of almonds and their nutritional and economic value relative to other California crops.

The evidence is in and it looks even worse for almonds.

Remember the statistic of 1.1 gallons of water per almond?  It's actually 12 liters or 3.2 gallons per almond.

It got kinda wonky

Consumptive water use includes the water from managed sources, termed “blue water,” effective rainfall or “green water” and pollution impacts to ground and surface water, termed “grey water.”

Translation:

• Green water falls from the sky
• Blue water is managed by humans by pumping it up from underground aquifers or transporting it from another region
• Grey water is the amount of water fouled by pollution from almond production assuming all polluted water is diluted to safety. (Water is not always diluted to safe standards.  It can be cleaned up in other ways that don't take as much water, but require access to technology, energy and money)

Water inputs to almonds by type.  Notice the tiny amount of rainwater (green) used relative to imported or groundwater and how polluting it is.

Almond apologists chime, "Almonds are nutritious!" True, but how do they rank nutritionally compared to other California crops? "Spinach, broccoli, raspberries, artichokes, and kiwifruit rank similarly in relative nutrient content but rank better in terms of water footprint."

Almonds use more water than any other crop and provide less nutritional value than other tree nuts.  Almonds are comparable nutritionally to some row crops like spinach, broccoli and berries--but at much higher water cost.

The money shot:

Almonds are a mediocre money-maker relative to their water input.  It falls on the line with most other crops.  Spinach, strawberries, and berries in general,  are the real money makers.

Almonds do bring in the most revenue per kilogram of all food crops, but with mediocre returns relative to saner crops. If we wanted to maximize revenue for water consumed, we should grow spinach, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries. Moreover, spinach and berries are row crops, which means their acreage can be rotated or fallowed as conditions warrant.

Almond trees need to be  irrigated year-round, every year.  In drought years, when there is little rainfall and no water to import, almond growers pump obscene amounts of water from aquifers (some 100,000 to millions of years old) until the land literally breaks and sinks. The acreage under these almond farms is sinking up to 11 inches per year, breaking roads, bridges and aqueducts.

Almond farmers are privatizing a public resource, groundwater, and socializing the cost of their irresponsible behavior (pollution, broken shared infrastructure.)  Until we attain the political will to drastically reduce and regulate almond farms, don't buy almond products.  Please spread the word that vegan is not always good for the environment or the earth.

Which is more sustainable, GMO or organic cotton?

The answer is...GMO cotton!

I was so discouraged by the number of sewing bloggers in instagrammers who equated organic cotton with sustainable sewing.  I felt like screaming into the void and started collecting data.  I collected so much data and research articles to counter the popular narrative that it won't fit in one post.

This topic is complex and will be broken down into several posts, interspersed with stories about water, because cotton and water are intimately interlinked.  GMO (genetically modified) cotton now produces twice as much fibre as organic cotton for the same water input (and grows with lower quality water and soil.)  Given the severe water shortages around the world and the land poisoning and subsidence problems caused by irrigating cotton fields around the world, I think that using organic cotton when there are better alternatives is just irresponsible.

I'm reminded of this 2015 Pew study:

The views in 2017 were similarly discouraging with white people more likely to believe conspiracies theories over scientific expertise than people of color (POC.)  I have many reservations about Roundup-ready crops, but there is a whole universe of GMO crops that are better for the environment than legacy organic crops.

As Science Moms says,

GMOs are presented in the media as inserting genes of one species into another species. But that’s only one meaning. Genetic modification also means selective breeding, cross breeding, mutagenesis, genome editing, and other techniques.
...
Everything is made of chemicals. They show a long list of all the scary-sounding chemicals in an all-natural blueberry. Pears naturally make formaldehyde.

The “most brilliant marketing move of the last ten years” was to convince everyone that organic is pesticide free. Copper sulfate is really bad for the environment, and it’s allowed in organic farming.

Data doesn’t support claims that organic is pesticide free, better for environment, or healthier.

On a really sad note, did you read this story about the artist that worked with mussel shells for 15 years, slowly killing herself, without realizing that natural materials can be toxic?

She’d spend up to 12 hours a day molding the shells with a dentist’s drill. While she ventilated her studio, she didn’t make any special effort to avoid the shell byproducts, assuming they were benign.

But almost immediately after starting the work, Genser started feeling ill. After years living with various autoimmune disorders, she was used to her body betraying her. But she soon realized these symptoms were different. As her limbs alternately ached and became immobile, she suffered neurological ailments as well. At her worst moments, she could barely speak, lost her short-term memory and stopped recognizing close friends.

She saw a litany of specialists in neurological health and psychiatrists who prescribed antipsychotics and antidepressants, but nothing seemed to help.

“To be fair to my doctors, they did ask me, ‘Are you working with anything toxic?’ And I’d say, ‘No no, I’m working with all natural materials, and we’d all move on,’” she said. “I was so certain that these mussels, which the government said I could eat safely and buy in the market as food, could never be bad for me.”

She dry-sanded shells for 15 years without wearing any respiratory or skin protection!  You can safely eat some parts of toxic plants and animals.  For instance, I love peaches.  But I eat only the soft flesh and leave the hard pit (and the cyanide in them) alone.  Mussel muscles can be safe to eat (in moderation,) but the shells bioaccumulate metals in the water.  You definitely should handle them with care.

It breaks my heart to see sewing bloggers fall for disinformation campaigns like when Sue quoted a natural soap "expert".  I sent her a horrified email and she posted a follow-up.  I wrote:

Scientists now have to take classes to learn the rhetorical tricks used by people who would slander us. I recognize one device in her description of Titanium Dioxide. Link it with something that is not safe to put on your skin, like house paint. Yes, TiO2 is sometimes used in house paint, but it would be very expensive house paint. It’s the safer and brighter white alternative to lead. You can also accurately call TiO2 the active ingredient in chemical-free baby-safe sunscreen.

EDTA is a perfectly safe preservative. Your soap is safer with it than without it. In fact, we eat it all the time as a food preservative rather than eat rancid food.

Ironically, the EDTA that the "expert" listed as a skin irritant and bad chemical is the chelating agent used to treat patients suffering from heavy metal poisoning like Genser.

Thank-you Jonathan Gold and Linda Burum

I was saddened to read of Jonathan Gold's death over the weekend. Others wrote about his importance quite eloquently. Gustavo Arellano (Ask a Mexican) explained, "His strength lay in the fact that he wrote as someone thankful that the Los Angeles of today was not the Los Angeles of his youth."

Ruth Reichl, his friend and former editor wrote:

But Jonathan didn’t want us to go out to Monterey Park simply to eat Sichuan pickles. He didn’t lure us out to El Monte or the world’s best birria burritos for their mere deliciousness. He wrote enticing prose designed to take us out of our safe little territories to mingle with other people because he knew that restaurants aren’t really about food. They’re about people.

He gave us the keys to a hidden city, introduced us to folks we’d never have known. And the city changed. It is nothing like the city I found when I first came here in 1984.

If you want to understand LA, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Gold's classic, Counter Intelligence: Where to eat in the real Los Angeles.

Gold wrote a column for the Counter Intelligence column for the LA Weekly starting in the mid-1980s.  A collection of the columns was published as this book in 2000.

When we first moved to Los Angeles in the 1990s, A Guide to Ethnic Food in Los Angeles by Linda Burum (1992) was our LA food atlas.

We used to read the chapters (organized by ethnic food type) while looking at the AAA map of Metro Los Angeles (for the big picture) and the Thomas Guide for details. We planned outings to different areas of LA around food and walking around.

Until I moved to LA, I didn't understand it. It's still so vast and hard to describe. But food sociology is certainly a great way to start. Go out and explore. Eat. Look around. Listen. Talk to people.

I sat next to a food critic on a flight who knew Linda Burum. I asked why she didn't update her guide. He said that she moved to NY and was doing other stuff now. In the obituaries and tributes to the important work that Jonathan Gold and Anthony Bourdain have done in popularizing food sociology/anthropology, I see little mention of women.

I want to remind people not to overlook the women who were already there, doing the work in plain sight.  So many women have done the patient work of spending time in kitchens and explaining culture through food.   Culture has room for many heroes.

Brooks Falls live cam screenshots

For no reason in particular, I want to show some screen shots from the live Bear Cam at explore.org.

It's really hard to get the screen shot just as the salmon jump.

Chow time at Brooks Falls

Brooks Falls - Katmai National Park, Alaska

Live! Bears! Salmon! Birds! Waterfall!

See the live Bear Cam at explore.org.

Faux Disruption

I read Home Delivery! What Will They Think of Next? by Peter Funt with a chuckle.

When I bought my first Bernina, I went to the store by bike. The Bernina dealer delivered the machine to my home on her way home from work. Another colleague bought a framed picture and the art dealer delivered it to him at home, too.

At one time, the Boulder Public Library delivered requested books to your home in a "green bag." You return the bag and the book to the library later.

Funt rightly points out that dot coms like AmazonFresh and Instacart are inventing stuff that already exists. Home delivery of food was ubiquitous from the days when milkmen and green grocers were common sights on the street. Grocery stores delivered because most housewives didn't have cars.  They never stopped offering home delivery.

When I was in graduate school 20+ years ago, a classmate without a car told me about King Soopers' home delivery service. She would ride her bike to KS, select her weekly fresh food plus monthly nonperishable staples, and then take them to the customer service desk to arrange for home delivery. She then rode her bike home and met the KS delivery van a few minutes later. The rest of the month, she bought just what she could carry by bike.

Back then, King Soopers charged $9 to pull your groceries and deliver to your home. If you needed only one of those services; e.g. you pulled your own groceries and just needed delivery, or you needed someone to pull the groceries for you and load them up into your own car at the store, then you paid about half as much as full (pull+delivery) service.

For about $5/month, my friend solved one of the difficulties of being car-free.

The Denver Channel compared different home food delivery services and discovered that, while Instacart allows you to order groceries from King Soopers, Instacart offers a much smaller selection and charges 30% more than if you order directly from KS.

King Soopers Homeshop would cost me $96.12 for delivery and $90.12 for pick-up, followed by Instacart who cost $134.51, or 30% more than just ordering from King Soopers directly.

Home delivery was a necessary service before private cars were commonplace. For less mobile people, particularly the sick and elderly, those services are a lifeline.

Silicon Valley did not invent any of this. SV just pays their workers less, charges you more, and evades taxes.

This is an extension of my thoughts about Fauxtomation.

Fauxtomation

This new word hit the zeitgeist on June 19, 2017 thanks to @astradisastra.

The next day, Mel Healy wrote a smart essay about Fauxtomation and the Mechanical Turk.

For all their tech, many leading tech firms nowadays may be rather more “hi-Turk”, relying on cheap labour to do the day-to-day maintenance and moderation of their social media. Like the Mechanical Turk’s operator these people are largely hidden away inside big boxes, only this time the boxes are on the opposite side of the planet, in India or the Philippines. Vast armies of invisible workers in underdeveloped countries.

Each box is decidedly unglamorous compared with the shiny new HQs and campuses of Silicon Valley in California or Google Docks in Dublin. You won’t find any fancy games rooms and lavish staff restaurants, or “micro kitchens”, chillout zones, fitness centres, swimming pools, wellness areas, tech stops or phone booths.

June 23, 2017, Shira Ovide wrote about the army of workers needed to bring you Amazon's one-click convenience.

Fauxtomation is the word that crystalizes why I feel so angry about gushing articles like this about places like Eatsa, a restaurant that supposedly serves vegetarian food made by robots.

Customers tap their meal selections on an iPad or their smartphone and pay electronically. No cash is taken here. Then when the order is ready, hands slide the meal into a “cubby,” which lights up with the customer’s name. The plan is for it to be ready in less than minutes from the time the order is placed.

Silicon Valley reinvented the automat. But--most insidiously--this time, they are selling a guilt-free low-cost experience by pretending that a low-paid human did not make the food.

Eatsa is the brainchild of Scott Drummond, a techie focused on data-driven results. He says forgoing meat, along with staff, helps keep the cost of goods down.

Drummond is all about the data science and other buzz words/phrases such as “enhanced predictive and personal health engagement.” But can robots prepare these meals? If so, what a breakthrough in robotics!

How the kitchen will hold up remains to be seen. For now, at least, it relies on human components: about five employees involved in prepping, assembling, and expediting behind the store’s façade.

The dirty secret finally comes out, there are people hiding in the mechanical Turks. Even then, he obfuscates further by invoking the glamour of warfare and robotics.

But for now, Eatsa still needs a few good chefs, with some special skills. “They can’t be afraid of technology,” say Drummond. “Our first general manager used to be a military robotics specialist.”

You betcha that a robotics expert is not the guy making your $7 lunch in San Francisco.

Wonkblog explains the crisis in restaurant staffing, particularly in high cost areas such as SF-SV.

And don't even get me started on Blue Apron's unsafe working conditions necessary to bring us cheap, home-cooked meals.  Food, like clothing, is not going to be cheap and fast unless we sacrifice some people.  Are we willing to confront those choices head-on?

Addendum:
The Washington Post reports that shipping costs account take up 30% of the price of Blue Apron meals.  It's a big driver in why BA squeezes their kitchen staff to work at unsafe speeds or to work off the clock without pay.

The high cost of grapes

Last week when my daughter and I were grocery shopping, she recalled the story about how I boycotted grapes for a decade* and asked if it was ok to buy them now.  I said yes with the caveat that we would buy only what we would really eat.  We were not going to let any rot in the fridge.

Do you remember when grapes were stupidly cheap? Stores used to advertise them for $.10 or $.15 per pound!  I think that today's $2/pound for California grapes (hauled hundreds of miles to Colorado) is still crazy cheap.

CA grapes image courtesy of ucanr.edu

Grapes--like all produce--is stupidly cheap because we treat farm workers as disposable people. It routinely reaches 110F (43C) at harvest time in the San Joaquin Valley.  Grape pickers work 10-12 hours a day in the searing heat to bring the harvest in on time.

Look at this list of farmworkers that died 2004-2008.  They are still dying.  Three people died in two days in 2016, including Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez.  It's not just grape pickers.

From California's Harvest of Shame: 2012

When a farm worker at Giumarra Vineyards, the largest table grape grower in the country, died of heat in 2004, the United Farm Workers union (UFW) began a campaign to end heat deaths. Since California issued its 2005 regulations to keep farm workers from dying of extreme heat, however, preventable farm worker deaths have continued to occur.
...
The fact is that the state simply just doesn’t have the resources to adequately enforce its heat standards. According to an August 22 editorial in the Desert Sun, “Last year only 1,090 heat inspections were conducted on California’s 81,500 farms. At that rate, many violations could go unnoticed.”

Fortunately, the UFW has a remedy. It has sponsored two bills — the Humane Treatment for Farm Workers Act (AB 2676), sponsored by Assembly member Charles Calderon, and the Farm Worker Safety Act (AB 2346), sponsored by Assembly member Betsy Butler — that will allow farm workers to protect themselves.

The Humane Treatment for Farm Workers Act says that agricultural employers must treat farm workers at least as well as animals or face the same criminal penalties. (California law makes it punishable as a misdemeanor or felony for every person who fails to provide any animal with proper food, drink, shelter or protection from the weather). The bill has already passed the Senate floor and is on its way to the Assembly.

BTW, the bill was vetoed by Governor Brown on the grounds that existing laws were sufficient.  It's hard to see this legal outcome (40 hours community service, 3 years probation and a $370 fine for killing someone) and agree with him.

As a matter of conscience (and consistency), I think that the laws against mistreating humans should be as strong as the laws against mistreating animals.

Driving down Interstate 5, I notice shelters for shade near workers and the occasional chair with an overhead mister for cooling.  Farms located where people are watching probably put on a better show. Perhaps, in the era of personal drones, we can make it harder for farmers and contractors everywhere to evade laws.

I'm heartened by the people who see an opportunity to make working conditions better and scale up. Check out Garth Patterson's $20,000 portable cooling station that can cool down 12 people at once.  Where there's a problem, there's an opportunity!

Garth Patterson with his portable cooling station.  Photo courtesy of AP via ChicoER.

I'm also heartened by the public pressure that is forcing Cal-OSHA to do their job in protecting farm workers from heat stress.

Heat deaths are not the only problem.  Heat stress can lead to kidney failure.  Think about the cost of dialysis and disability payments.  Think about disposable people.

What do you think the true cost of grapes ought to be?

For legal geeks:

Liability for Heat-Related Injuries by San Joaquin Agricultural Law Review

Aside:

* When I was a member of a Berkeley Student Cooperative, a member came to house council to ask why we never had any grapes in the kitchen. The kitchen manager explained that we subscribed to and followed the recommendations in the National Boycott Newsletter, which recommended boycotting grapes.

Summer grapes came from California's central valley, where farmers were resisting farm workers' demands for better pay and working conditions. Winter grapes came from Chile, which was run by the brutal ruler, Pinochet.

Damage to Chile's economy from boycotts might have helped push him out of power in 1988.

The case against antibacterial soap

Yesterday's big environmental news was the FDA ban on triclosan, triclocarban and 17 other toxic chemicals commonly added to soaps.  Scientists' reactions ranged between "Huzzah!" to "Why did it take 40 years for the FDA to listen to us?"

Bad Dad and I both earned BSs in chemistry so we are familiar with the issue.  However, I realize that most families don't have even one BS in chemistry, especially because chemistry is one of the least popular majors in the United States.  (Which is a shame, because chemistry is truly the "central science" that bridges the life and physical sciences, and gives people a great foundation for understanding the world.)

Here's some stuff to think about and discuss around your dinner table.  OK, we are comfortable discussing bioreactors and biosolids around the dinner table, but maybe you want to wait until after everyone has finished eating in your home.  ;-)

Any soap or body wash that says "antibacterial" probably contains one of the newly-banned substances.

For these to work effectively, you have to wash with them much, much longer than most people do.  You know how long surgeons and surgical nurses scrub their hands (until they are red and raw?); that's how long.  That means, outside of hospitals, antibacterial soaps are not doing anything but going down the drain.

What happens to stuff that goes down the drain?  Glad you asked!  I wrote a series of posts about that.

Think about all the stuff you send down the drain (kitchens, bathrooms, laundry).  Think about everything you ingest and then excrete.  BTW, waste water is a great way to find out how much and what type of drugs/pharmaceuticals people are ingesting.

Your sewage is sent through a screen to separate solids from liquid. The solids are often sent through a bioreactor with bacteria that breaks down the solids. The biosolids (with or without the bioreactor step) are spread on agricultural fields as fertilizer, landfilled or incinerated.

This can be a good thing. Incineration reduces waste AND produces energy. Biosolids are cheaper for farmers (about 1/4 the cost of petrochemical fertilizers) and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

The problem is us. We send too much non-necessary chemicals down the drain.

ASU Professor Rolf Halden gave a plenary talk last month at the American Chemical Society's meeting in which he showed that just two chemicals, triclosan and triclocarban, make up 60% of the pharmaceuticals found in municipal biosolids.

This chart is a screen shot from his article in Nature. Note that the horizontal axis is logarithmic so a difference of one tick mark is a factor of ten.  Click to make the graph bigger.

The US produces (and we presume, use) about 2,000 metric tonnes each of triclocarban and triclosan.  4.8-48.2% of the triclocarban ends up in biosolids.  The rest probably remains in the water.  1.8-18% of triclosan ends up in biosolids; more of it remains in the water than triclocarban.

Excerpt from Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products in Archived U.S. Biosolids from the 2001 EPA National Sewage Sludge Survey:

Of the more than 7 million tons of sewage sludge produced in the United States in 2004, about 50% was applied to land as fertilizer or soil amendment, and 45% was disposed of in landfills or as landfill cover.

 I've already written about how triclosan can photo-degrade into dioxin under UV light. ("Dioxins are highly toxic and can cause reproductive and developmental problems, damage the immune system, interfere with hormones and also cause cancer.") It doesn't matter whether the triclosan is applied through biosolids or irrigation water. This finding has now been replicated in labs around the world and is accepted scientific fact.

But, incinerating triclosan is also extremely risky.  Excerpt from Halden's research home page:

In addition to toxins in wastewater, Halden’s team is researching the emission of toxic dioxin into U.S. air from incineration of triclosan-laden municipal sludge, or biosolids

Furthermore, these newly-banned substances have all been found to bio-accumulate, not just in earth worms and frogs but in you and me.  These are hazardous chemicals that should not be in our ecosystem.

Antibacterial soaps have their uses--in hospitals--but should not be in widespread use in homes.  They do nothing beneficial under normal home use, but cumulatively do great environmental and health harm.

 Read more:

• Wastewater Treatment Plants as Chemical Observatories to Forecast Ecological and Human Health Risks of Manmade Chemicals
• Environmental Exposure of Aquatic and Terrestrial Biota to Triclosan and Triclocarban
• Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products in Archived U.S. Biosolids from the 2001 EPA National Sewage Sludge Survey
• Triclosan Exposure Increases Triclosan Resistance and Influences Taxonomic Composition of Benthic Bacterial Communities

Studying while hungry

I read this study of food insecurity among University of California students with dismay.  It appears that rent is eating their food budgets so they are eating too little or cheap low-nutrition food, just to make ends meet.

I'd like to give a shout-out to the Berkeley Student Cooperative, where I lived for my last three years at Berkeley.  BSC was a key component of my Berkeley education and I am so grateful that I found it.

Home, sweet home.  Rooftop deck and study area at CZ.  Photo courtesy of Victory Garden.

During the great depression of the 1930s, many students suffered from malnutrition.  (I read a long time ago that professors reported students fainting in class from hunger.  If you have a link that substantiates that, can you leave it in the comments?)

Students in the BSC went to the Oakland Produce Market to buy food wholesale and in bulk.  Then other students took turns cooking and serving food (work shifts).  It was and remains a low-cost, and time-efficient way to obtain high-quality food near campus.

Plus, you learn skills.  I know how to operate a Hobart, an industrial dishwasher, how to dismantle and clean a commercial range, food safety laws...

The best part of BSC is the people I met.  I roomed with a black roommate one semester before I collected enough points to live in a single.  I can never walk in her shoes, but walking beside her was a crash course in US race relations.  That's one reason why I feel so strongly about #BlackLivesMatter.

Unlike the 1930s, the hunger experienced by 40% of today's UC students is caused by a strong economy.  Rising rents is literally eating the students' lunch.  It appears that the Oakland Produce Market is also at high risk due to rising rents.

I've come to realize that some basics--basic food, housing, healthcare, education and some types of data--are too important to leave to the free market.  Oops, writing that sentence took a long time because I kept thinking of things that needed to go on that list, such as environment, water, power...

As a society, we have work to do.  Let's push back with data and an open mind to problems and solutions.

I left my heart in LA

I've written before about my melancholy when I leave LA to return to Boulder. The last trip was extended because of a family crisis. In between care-taking and medical appointments, Bad Dad and I managed to sneak in cultural breaks. 

For us, LA is all about the food, the culture and the beach. (I don't mean to discount rocket science even though that's what brought us to LA initially, but we're talking about the things that we love outside of work.)

It's nice to read that even the NY Times agrees with us:

No city in the country is more exciting than Los Angeles right now. Despite pop culture portrayals of Los Angeles as either comically superficial or darkly dystopian, the nation’s second largest metropolis is a vivid, soulful, eclectic city. It’s home to year-round blooms and captivating street murals, musical innovation and outsider art, deeply rooted communities and world-class food cooked by chefs from around the globe. The greatest challenge for visitors is not what to do, but which version of this vast city to embrace.

We went to LACMA to see Reigning Men and the Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective.

Look at that metallic embroidery.

Those short britches may require a bit of calf enhancement.

Cultural institutions of LA collaborate. For instance, LACMA and the Getty share a huge body of photography. The Getty Center is also showing Robert Mapplethorpe photographs as well as the work of some of his contemporaries and the collection of his first major collector/patron.

Getty Center hallway.

Meanwhile, the Japanese American National Museum is showing Making Waves: Japanese American Photographs 1920-1940. That show is incredible and not to be missed. Although most of the photographs made by these artists were lost or destroyed, what remains shows that, had they not been incarcerated (and racism), they would have been as famous as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.

LACMA extends the argument further, with their own exhibition of Japanese Prints and Photographs: Paths Through Modernity.

I cannot stress this enough.  When you visit LA, skip the Tourist Traps and theme parks and head to the cultural institutions and the ethnic enclaves.  You will be met with friendly courtesy, fantastic food and insight into how diverse people and cultures live peacefully and cooperatively side by side.

Fried chicken, waffles and collard greens in Inglewood.

Downtown LA (DTLA) is hopping these days.  Stores are open (and busy!) on weekends.

The detailing on the old buildings is amazing.

Clifton's Cafeteria is open after their extensive remodel.  Prices and food quality are up.

The LA food scene uses traditional techniques with new ingredients and ideas.  For instance, dim sum places offer more and more vegetarian options.  Ocean Seafood will serve you seafood that looks back at you.  (Baby octopuses, anyone?)  But, even vegetarians can be challenged with tofu (stuffed with tofu instead of the traditional pork) that dares you to eat it.

Even the tofu dim sum at Ocean Seafood is served with faces intact.

When you come visit, pack for our mild and foggy summers.  You don't need a down jacket (that's San Francisco), but bring a light jacket for cool mornings and evenings.

June gloom extended all the way to the San Gabriel Mountains the day I left.