• There are some videos of Scott and Gillie's successful test for 1st-degree black belts in Taekwondo.
• There are some new photos.

A recent Dilbert that was humorous:

Also from Scott Adams is a recent blog posting called The Common Crisis in which he skillfully relates the following crises all back to food: economic crisis, water shortages, global warming, health care, and energy.

• "Don't Buy Any Food You've Ever Seen Advertised". This seems to be Pollan's new mantra (behind his earlier mantra of "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."). Ninety-four percent of ad budgets for food go to processed food. Think about it: you never seen an advertisement for carrots or broccoli.
• Don't eat any food that comes with a health claim. It sounds counterintuitive, but if you're worried about your health, that is not the healthy food. The healthy food is in the produce section. It's sitting there very quietly, without budgets to do this research, without budgets for marketing, without packages to print health claims on.
• The reason we have a School Lunch Program is to get rid of this incredible overproduction of American agriculture. We're using our children as a disposal for excess: cheap ground beef and cheese and all these corn products. Under the School Lunch Program we feed our kids chicken nuggets and tater tots in school. We're using the School Lunch Program to teach kids how to become fast-food consumers.
• The Centers for Disease Control estimates that of the $2 trillion we're spending on healthcare in this country, $1.5 trillion is for the treatment of preventable chronic disease. Now, that's not all food, because you have smoking in there, too, and alcoholism. But the bulk of it is food. Food is implicated in heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and about 40 percent of cancers.

• The artwork section has Gillie's submission for this year's Doodle for Google contest.
• There is a photo of the finished garden beds, with Kathy having added some frames for a grid to designate for specific crops.
• We've made it to a few more vegetarian- and vegan-friendly restaurants and added them to our Vegetarian and Vegan Restaurants in Milwaukee list. We were especially ga-ga over the pizza at Marchese's Olive Pit, had some nice sandwiches at the Fuel Cafe, and enjoyed great brunch options at Ginger. The list now offers the option to show only places that serve breakfast along with a "recommended" icon next to our favorites.

Yanoff Family "Green" Tip(s):

One frugal yet effective way to be "green" is to buy used items instead of always buying new (and thereby forcing what may be a perfectly reasonable used item to end up in a landfill). Recently, Scott bought a pair of gap khakis in his hard-to-find size off of eBay. They were labeled "NWT", for "New With Tag" and if you know your size but have to shell out money for the same type of business casual clothes from time to time, eBay is a great option for this. His $44 Gap khakis were less than half that from eBay. Kathy's had luck finding jeans on eBay as well.

Another option is "freecycling", which is basically either swapping items with someone or lucking out on something someone left on their curb. This is fantastic alternative to simply throwing something out, or buying something new. There's a Yahoo Group, MilwaukeeWIFreecycle, that you can join and post something you'd like to give away, or something you are interested in. We haven't picked anything up from the group yet, although there seems to be a tradition in our area where people put something on their curb when they are done with it in the hopes of neighborhood scavengers finding a use for it. Here is a list of the best freebies we've found curb-side so far:

• Sofa (currently in our basement)
• Hammock stand (est. value $100)
• Weider pro weight bench (est. value $80)
• Swiffer wet jet
• A full set of Taekwondo sparring equipment
• Office chairs
• Halloween decorations and misc garden ornaments
• Garden hose reel

• The Canadian tax code does not provide the massive incentive for overconsumption that the U.S. code does: interest on your mortgage isn't deductible up north. Interest deductibility alone costs the federal government $100 billion a year — because they allow the average Joe to fulfill the American Dream of owning a home.
• In addition, home loans in the United States are "non-recourse," which basically means that if you go belly up on a bad mortgage, it's mostly the bank's problem. In Canada, it's yours.
• Sixty-eight percent of Americans own their own homes. And the rate of Canadian homeownership? It's 68.4 percent.
• Not only do they have housing figured out, they also have a solvent pension system versus our troubled Social Security system, and its health-care system is cheaper than America's by far (accounting for 9.7 percent of GDP, versus 15.2 percent here), and yet does better on all major indexes.
• Life expectancy in Canada is 81 years, versus 78 in the United States; "healthy life expectancy" is 72 years, versus 69. American car companies have moved so many jobs to Canada to take advantage of lower health-care costs that since 2004, Ontario and not Michigan has been North America's largest car-producing region.

• We've finally put up some family photos and videos for 2009.
• In case you haven't noticed lately, there are new quoets for 2009 from both Carly and Gillie.
• Check out the update vegetarian restaurants list as well.

Meanwhile, we spent our Spring Break in town and were fortunate enough to have some really great weather. Along with the usual yardwork, we put together 3 garden boxes. These will serve to replace and expand upon what Kathy started last year with the replacement of a third of our backyard in favor of vegetables. We've met several like-minded people in the area who are promoting a "Move Grass, Grow Food" movement. Kathy and Carly made several signs, one of which is now in our front yard. It seems that our backyard vegetarian movement is complimented by a fully-carnivorous diet of mice, chipmunks, and rabbits being carried out by the hawks that always return to our area in the spring. There's photos of them in the photos section, although someday we'll get a camera with a really great zoom on it and get some better photos.

Lastly, two recent articles we've posted to the Vegetarian Articles page:

Milk in Schools

rbGH has been linked to increased rates of infections in dairy cows, elevated antibiotic use, and unresolved questions about its links to serious human health risks, including cancer. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and all 25 members of the European Union have banned the use of rbGH, and the Codex Alimentarius, the United Nations' main food safety body, twice decided that it could not endorse the safety of rbGH for human health.

Cancer & Our Food - A Must Read

The first punch comes in the opening line: "Cancer is a largely preventable disease." Overwhelming evidence blames a third of cancers on cigarette smoking, the report says. Equally overwhelming evidence puts the combination of poor diet and insufficient exercize a close second. Without even counting the cancers caused by polluting carcinogens, these conclusive findings reframe cancer as an "environmental disease" — in medical terms, one that comes from the environment external to the patient's body and genes.