degrowthprojectprocesscolley - Tumblr blog

[degrowthprojectprocesscolley]

Overall I feel as if I was semi successful. Being in college and trying to spend less and make more was definitely challenging. I feel like I succeeded in become more aware of my patterns and getting creative with different ways to transform paper bags instead of putting them in the recycling. I feel that I was also successful in building up skill based capital. The ways I did not feel successful was that I kept spending money on food even though I did have the option to cook. Trying to make more things while trying to balance school, work, and extracurriculars proved to be challenging. What ended up happening was I made the bread, pizza dough, bagels etc. over the span of only two days. I think overall it was a good exercise and I will be keeping degrowth in the back of my mind every time I think about as well as spend money.

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Throughout this journey, for me, not much about it has been challenging. It has, however, forced me to become more aware of my habits as a human and how my patterns of spending affect my mental well-being. By making food I mentally felt a lot better when I could see, smell, touch, and taste the result of my labor in the kitchen. This was a lot better than seeing how far & how much 20$ could get me at a restaurant or the grocery store. Although now that I think about it would have been fun to see how far a set amount of money spent at the store, could make how many meals. Maybe that is something that I will explore out of college when budgeting becomes more important especially with prices steadily increasing.

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Another thing that I noticed throughout this project is that I subconsciously don't say yes to receipts when the cashiers ask. As well as that I order off of a lot of fast food apps, so therefore I unfortunately do not have an economic trail (so to speak) of how much I spent on food going out or the amount of times that I did go out for a meal. What I do have though are some paper bags to show for it. I definitely have more, but it would have taken much longer to make more of the paper bag books. However, this was not a one person effort to collect bags. I had several of my friends save them and give them to me and I think the total was somewhere around 50 takeout bags which just reinforces the fast food culture for college students.

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One of the things that I have noticed throughout my degrowth project experience is that my quality of life increased. Especially when it came to making foods that I normally would have bought, it allowed to appreciate knowing the exact ingredients that I was putting into my body. Even though I did not grow any of my own food, or even sustainably source the ingredients for the food I ended up making, it made me realize how far a single bag of flour can go. One of the questions that I wanted to answer for this project was how many food items can I get out of a single bag of flour, and the answer was about 6. It could have been more, but I did decide to double the pizza dough recipe as well as the one for the cinnamon swirl bread as I was making them for other people, but just imagine how far one bag of flour can go if you are just making food for yourself.

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This was the last thing that I wanted to make for my project. From my initial idea of turning paper bags into paper, I settled on making a paper bag book. The purpose this serves is for doodles, or random thoughts that need to be scribbled down. It definitely does not look pretty, but it came out the way that I wanted it to. I tried to use as few materials as possible for this. I ended up make 2 different booklets out of 10 paper bags. I cut them all up and stapled them together. As far as economic patterns with this project it shows that when the dinning on campus does not have any good options my friends and I prefer to go out instead of cooking food and that is because half the time we don't have food to cook and don't have enough money for a trip to the store. We fall for the convivence of going and getting fast food for less than 12$ for a meal that day. I guess similar to the Georgian refugees, food is apart of the college student culture and when the options that the university provide for us are sub par we look for other options, sometimes even driving 20 min. to Sonic simply because one of my friends was craving their tater tots.

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An update on the paper making process as well as trying to use the dried orange peels to make a orange peel sugar scrub. After doing a bit more research into the sugar scrub making process it recommends removing the pith from the peel before drying them out and making them into a powder. The orange peels that I had collected ended up drying out with the pith still on them which made it hard to remove. I unfortunately ended up throwing them away even though I could have made them into compost, but I do not actively have a garden of some kind that could benefit from the compost. I also do not have anywhere to store it in my dorm room.

As far as the paper I realized that it was probably too much to take on in a single semester with everything that I do, I simply have not been able to find the time to put the project together. However, I still have the bags and came across something (yesterday 4/9) on my Instagram feed called a paper bag book (pictured above.) I am going to pursue this project instead and hopefully be able to make a few before the final submission is due.

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When it comes to the production of wheat and it's impact on the environment it is very minimal. The milling farms produce almost zero waste, so the biggest thing is the amount of energy used to transform the wheat into flour. I have also had some trouble finding sources that deep dive into this topic, but I am continuing to research the data surrounding wheat production and it's impact on the environment. I did however come across this website where you can find farms near by that sell different foods/produce/grain https://www.localharvest.org/search.jsp?jmp&scale=9&lat=39.04501&lon=-76.596422

I did this because I was looking into how easy it is to buy wheat kernels from the store. It looks like you can buy some, but the prices range anywhere from about 10$ up to 60$ or more. By using Local Harvest you can look up farms near your zip code and read the story of the farm/what they grow, so even if the price of wheat kernel is cheaper or more expensive than buying in store you at least have the option to buy locally. If you wanted to make your own flour Amazon sells kitchen counter mill grinders for around 50$.

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In addition to the bagels and the pizza, I also decided to make a cinnamon swirl bread to have for breakfast. I unfortunately forgot to take pictures as it was very very good. I ended up doubling the recipe so I could share some with my friends. In addition to the bagels and pizza this also only just took over an hour of my time and most of it was 45 minutes in the oven. I made this because I wanted to have a sweet kind of bread that could be eaten for either breakfast or as a dessert. I had all of the ingredients on hand and the best part was I made all three of these foods using the same flour (that cost 4.79$) and still had at least a cup or so left over. As far as the rest of the ingredients I already had them on hand and did not have to buy any additional ones.

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In addition to making bagels I also decided to make pizza dough. Typically on Friday's or the weekends my family will order pizza for carryout and that can get expensive, so I wanted to see how easy it was to make it homemade. I found a recipe online that called for bread flour, one packet of yeast (I decided on pizza yeast), sugar, salt, garlic powder, olive oil, and water. Luckily I had all of these ingredients on hand so I did not have to go out and buy anything additional with the exception of buying pizza yeast which I got while getting regular yeast. Pizza yeast helps with making the dough more manageable to work with. The pizza yeast cost 2.99$. Again, the dough only took about an hour to make. I did have a slight mishap with the dough as you can see in the first picture as it kept rising when I put it in the fridge which I was not expecting to happen but I was able to recover the exposed dough! As far as toppings I had all of them on hand as well. Although I would look into making homemade pizza sauce as well as growing my own mushrooms to help cut down on the cost.

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I decided to go a different route instead of making plain sand which bread because that simply seemed boring to me, so I decided to make some other things one of which being bagels. Here is the breakdown of cost for homemade bagels:

1lb bag of store brand bread flour: 4.79$

Water: my family has well water so we don't have to pay a water bill

Instant dry yeast for a pack of 3 from the store: 2.99$

Light brown sugar: my family had on hand but typically 3.79$ for store brand

Honey: already had but the cost of the 16oz unfiltered and raw honey is 9.99$

Trader Joe's everything but the bagel seasoning: 1.99$ for 2.3oz

It surprisingly only took just over an hour to make the bagels and this includes time for the dough to rise. In total it was an 1hr and 10 min time commitment to yield 6 bagels. The taste was much better than any store brand and I felt a lot better eating something that I made. In addition to those advantages, they were surprisingly more filling than store bought. For comparison a pack of 6 store bought bagels comes out to a total cost of 5.89$ which is less than the cost of total ingredients however with homemade food you can continue to make more without spending money. One thing that I would look more into would be making my own bagel seasoning next time I do this to evaluate the taste and maybe even decrease the cost.

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My overarching goal for this project is to see how much I can increase my cultural capital by learning and also improving skills. These are the parameters that I'm going to use for each of my "mini" projects for the semester. I love learning new skills especially if the process of making said things is going to teach me something. Since I have made bread in the past one thing that I have learned is how to slow down and not rush the process, because the result is always worth it in the end. I'm looking forward to what lessons paper making and making a scrub can teach me even if it is simply that they are more fun to make instead of buy. I typically find myself saying "What's the fun in that?" whenever someone brings up the coinvent option to what I'm trying to do.

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There are numerous benefits to homemade bread vs store bought. For example it is cheaper to make bread instead of buy it because the main two ingredients are yeast, AP flour, and water. That is the base and you can always add whatever your heart desires into it. The house smells great, you can control the ingredients, easy to make, etc. Store bought does last longer but that is because it is more processed and you don't always know what you are putting into your body. I haven't had the chance to look into the carbon footprint of different flours yet but the price comparison is different. It may be cheaper to buy bread at 4.49$ (the price of bread that my family usually buys) but buying the ingredients mean that you can make more than one loaf and get your money's worth. My goal is to make as much bread as I can over Spring Break and even try making bagels and then compare if it is worth it factoring time, cost, and taste. The store bought also creates more plastic waste since each loaf is individually packed.

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Since doing a bit more research into what paper bag production and recycling I still want to make paper out of the bags that I have so far. Especially after learning that if there is food residue then the bag can no longer be recycled. I will do this by using my families old blender to blend up the paper with lots of water in order to make a pulp. I'm not sure what I will use to make the frame of the Mould and deckle yet, but I'm planning on using the mesh orange bag to help mold the paper. Then I'm going to use an old car washing sponge to absorb the excess water and transfer the sheets onto an old cloth tee shirt. After that I will wait for them to dry before taking them off the tee shirt.

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I also did a bit of research into what I can do with dried orange peels. Lots of different options came up, but one that stood out to me was making a natural sugar scrub using coconut oil, cane sugar, and dried orange peels. This made me start to think about how much money I spend on gifts for people when it is their birthday or any other kind of holiday. I realized that I spend a lot on gifts for people so learning that there is a way to make a natural body scrub with dried orange peels got me thinking if I used the peels I have saved so far to do exactly that. It only takes about a week before it can start being used, but the downside is that I will need to find jars to put the scrubs in. My family tends to save glass jars for various reasons so I'm hoping I can use some of those. If I need more my local Goodwill seems to always have a great selection of jars that I can buy and use.

In a way this idea reminded me of the Braiding Sweetgrass reading when she talks about the council of pecans. Taking the pecans from the fallen tree and making them into a high protein porridge in the old times of her people. In my case I am using all of the resource nature has provided. I ate the fruit of the orange and with the peels I am going to turn them into a resource for friends and family. I also thought about how gift giving might create a sense of social debt amongst the people I give the orange scrubs to, but at the same time I wonder if there are certain occasions where it might not create social debt.

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Bags not having the recycling symbol vs ones that have the symbol

I decided to look more into paper bag production as well as the process of recycling them. Here is what I found: the bags are made from Kraft paper which produces a minimal carbon foot print, it is biodegradable as well as compostable. Those were the positives of my very surface level research. On the other hand I found that Kraft paper can only be recycled up to 7 times, and that any bags with food residue on them can't be recycled. Again, I did very surface level research so I'm not sure what happens to the discarded material or what indicates how many times a bag as been recycled. I started looking at the bags that I have collected so far and found it interesting that some of the bags do have the recycling symbol on them (a plain paper bag and a Panera bag) and other ones don't have the symbol (McDonalds and Chipotle) which makes me wonder if they are made out of Kraft paper like the others or if there is something different about these bags where they cannot be recycled. This is something I definitely want to do further research into.

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I eat at Panera at least once sometimes twice a day depending on the menu options at the top of the UC. Regretfully I have not saved every single bag since I came up with the idea for this project. I have found myself continuing to throw some of the away, but I want to break the habit in order to save the bags for my project. In addition to saving bags that I get, I have also enlisted the help of my friends to save any paper take out bags that they have, so I can make the most out of my project. I can only hope that by saving their bags, they realize how much paper they used to be throwing out, but are now saving. Assuming I get enough bags throughout the semester I think it would be fun to make everyone that has helped me with this project a journal with the recycled paper that way they can see what they were apart of. Most of my friends use journals, so it would be cool to make them each one so they don't have to keep buying a new one every time they fill one up. Even though living in a capitalistic economy that is based off of scarcity to create competition I want to do what I can to make something to help show that not everything that is made is scare to find. I think the over arching question with my project is "If you can't buy it, why not make it?"

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During the winter and spring months I end up consuming lots of oranges (at least two a day), as you can imagine the orange peels add up quickly. I have started saving them hoping to find something I can do with them sustainably to go along with this project. I also bought more oranges recently and realized they come in mesh bags. This is an important detail that I did not notice when I was buying them in the store. A mould and deckle are the key components to making paper (pictured above). I want to make one and one of the parts of the mould is a mesh piece that the paper pulp can strain through. I was wondering where I was going to find mesh I could use and now I am going to use the mesh bag my oranges came in, so I do not have to go out and buy mesh when I already have something that will work.