Hey there modern vegans and vegan curious,
it's Margaret.
And welcome back to ModVegan.
Today, I want to talk with you a bit about zero waste.
And in particular, the previous generations' approach
to the environment.
I was in Anacortes, Washington last week
visiting my family.
And Anacortes is a beautiful place.
It's on Fidalgo Island, which is part of the Vancouver-Island
chain, but it's in the United States,
and it's where my mother grew up
and it's where my grandparents have lived almost their entire lives.
My aunts and uncles all grew up there, my cousins...
and it's one of my favourite places in the world to visit.
And it's such a beautiful place.
Its pristine beaches, lovely, lovely things to see -
it's just gorgeous.
It's kind of the Pacific Northwest at its most beautiful.
But it's also a very sensitive ecosystem.
And it's particularly vulnerable to waste.
And it's something that everyone kind of knows when they live on the island.
It was interesting, one of the days that I was there,
there was actually a report in the Skagit Valley Herald,
which is their local newspaper.
And they were talking about waste in the lakes in Anacortes,
and how some people had been disposing of garbage in these lakes.
There was even a giant widescreen television
that had been dumped in the lake,
along with barrels of oil and all this other stuff.
We're talking serious dumping, not just littering.
This was serious.
And it's such a shame when you see these beautiful bodies of water there -
it's just tragic to think that anyone could do something like that.
But there's also signs of the more insidious garbage
that I was talking about in my video about plastic oceans.
And as you can see in that video, which I'm going to link here,
there's a big problem with just small pieces of plastic.
And it's something that I think people on that island
know of more and more.
And so even my grandparents, who are - you know, in their 80s now,
they may not be the most environmentally aware people on earth,
I know that my grandfather doesn't even - well, he didn't even believe in global warming for
a very long time,
I think he never believed in global warming.
But regardless of that, there's what you can see with your own eyes.
You may not be able to see global warming with your eyes,
but you definitely can see plastic in the oceans with your eyes.
And I think awareness of that problem helped my grandparents both to be very, very aware
of their waste.
And it was amazing just being at my grandmother's house
while I was there.
She has little containers - we call the margarine Becel in Canada,
but I can't remember - I think it's Imperial margarine in the United States?
These are the small little tubs of margarine,
while I was there, my grandmother filled this little tub
several times with compost garbage that she puts in her green bin to compost,
and then some of it in the garden.
But she has the compost,
so she's very careful about composting,
but her little underneath the sink garbage
- I think she maybe dumps it once a week.
And that's while we were there,
so who knows how often it fills up when it's just her by herself,
because there's so little garbage.
And she has this tiny little garbage can - I mean,
you should see it.
It's the size of kind of a small flower pot.
And that's her garbage.
Everything else is recycled.
I would say her garbage can is probably completely empty at the end of the month.
Because almost everything is recycled.
I don't even know if she actually bothers getting the garbage taken out.
But it was really incredible to see
how little garbage she produced, how fastidious she was
about composting everything.
And it really made me think about how much more
waste we use today.
My family is trying to be more careful about waste,
and it's something I've made a commitment to recently.
But I didn't realize until recently how much garbage
we are producing compared to previous generations.
And so seeing my grandmother's waste
compared to my own, made me really realize
how much more work that I had to do.
While I was in Anacortes, my grandfather passed away,
and I had noticed that he had his old safety razor
in a container next to the sink, with a bunch of other razors there,
and I think he stopped using this a few years ago
just because he was getting older,
and I'm not sure if he was still using this anymore,
but I found it in the container,
and I asked my grandmother if it was alright that I had it,
and she said "oh, absolutely, take anything else you want!"
And I said, no, no, this is the only thing,
because I don't want a bunch of stuff,
I want something that will remind me of grandpa,
because I remember him using it all the time,
and it's kind of cool that now I'm going to be able to use it.
And I've gone ahead and ordered my razor blades,
I haven't tried them yet.
But it was kind of a nice thing, because I've been thinking
of buying one, and I saw here in Canada on Amazon.ca
it was like $45-50 or something like that to buy a razor,
and so this was also a big money saver as well to find this.
It's just an old, probably 1960s or 70s Gillette razor,
safety razor.
It's one of the ones with the little
butterfly open top, which I kind of like,
I think that's going to be much easier to use than the other kind.
But it was just really nice to find.
And it's also a testament, again - my grandfather
had one of those little sharps containers there,
just completely filled with the little razors.
But I was also thinking, again,
how much less waste people produced back then.
And it was amazing to think how much now,
with disposable razors, we throw away all the time.
Especially disposable ones.
I mean, even if you do the little razor blades,
you still are wasting a lot.
Especially those giant five bladed monstrosities.
But we just produce so much waste in general,
compared to the way that we might have in the past.
My grandparents can their food -
I had a great conversation with my grandmother about
how my grandfather always believed in gardening,
because when he was growing up,
he grew up in a sharecropping family,
and so they raised their food, well, they raised these crops,
and then they were able to keep a portion of it,
and then they had to give the rest to the person who owned the land,
to sell.
So for his parents,
they did all that crop growing for the landlord,
but they also had their own small garden
that they kept for themselves.
And that's really what sustained them.
Because sometimes they didn't really have any money at all.
And so that was what fed them, was having the small garden.
And so, it was amazing - grandma mentioned that
for my grandfather, it was always very important
to have a garden, because he saw it as food security.
And it was the way that he had food security,
as a child and as a young adult,
when his family was just starting out in life.
And that was really interesting to see as well.
It's funny, because my grandmother makes jokes sometimes,
about how much she saves stuff,
and why she's so careful about things.
But it's just habit.
That's one of the things she says,
that it's "just a habit, I can't bear to waste things."
And it's not like my grandparents are hoarders
or anything like that,
although lately, I think because my grandfather's
been in the nursing home, they have a lot more food
than usual, because he's not eating any.
So my poor grandmother is surrounded with all this food
that she was saying "everyone in the family needs to take
some food, because I have too much food!"
Because she had lots of pantry items and things
that she didn't have time to eat.
But other than that, they're certainly not hoarders.
They're just frugal.
And it's amazing to see -
probably over the years I'm sure their household expenses
were extremely low, simply because they had their garden,
and because they didn't waste a lot.
And I think today, we're so used to throwing things away,
that we don't even think twice about it.
My grandparents were never people that were
overly sentimental about the past.
And particularly my grandfather was not at all.
Growing up as a sharecropper, he didn't think about
the good old days in that respect, in terms of technology
and things like that.
He always appreciated modern
technology and the fact that today we can get lots of things
for less money, that we have more abundance
than we did in the past.
But somehow, despite the fact that they took advantage
of the abundance of our modern society,
it didn't turn into waste.
And that's something that I would like to see more of,
or less of.
I'd love to see less waste.
I'd love to see people taking advantage
of all of the benefits that we have in modern society -
you know, our dishwashers and clothes-dryers,
and things like that.
There's a lot of good things that we have,
but we don't need to waste just because we have them.
I think that there's just a tendency to take things for granted.
And maybe that's the fact - especially for my grandfather -
many of these things were really privileges -
he never saw them as things to just waste.
And it's the same with my grandmother.
She appreciated what she had, and what she has,
and so she doesn't waste things.
And I think that's a really great attitude to cultivate in the next generation.
I want my children to be able to respect the environment more,
to care about it, and to realize that some of the benefits that they have,
come at a cost to the environment.
Even things like iPhones and iPads do come at a cost
to the environment, and we need to be mindful of that.
And to consider the kind of impact that we have.
To walk a little bit more lightly on this Earth.
And so, visiting with them gave me a kind of
renewed commitment to being more cautious
about my waste, and also to appreciate what we have
just that little bit more.
So it was really great experience.
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and I'll see you all in my next video.
Take care,
bye.
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