Daily Chai

Green poetry

This haiku was first published on Grist.org

A frog in water

Doesn't feel it boil in time

Dude, we're the frog!

Can you ever have too many bags?

Maybe not, if one of them is this long, quilted shoulder bag from Utility Canvas. It's so multi-functional that it can work as a (large) purse, yoga bag, beach bag or grocery tote.

Cafe Gratitude: organic, raw, vegan food that even a carnivore will love

Cafe Gratitudeis a restaurant that any visitor to San Francisco should try, if only to get a real slice of life here, from the passion for organic food to the hippy dippy culture to just having a really amazing meal.

This restaurant makes frothy latte drinks with only almond milk, and tasty desserts with no refined sugar -- not the tasteless desserts you might associate with a vegan restaurant, but real desserts like chocolate mousse and coconut cream pie.

But it's far more than a coffee and dessert place. It's a place that works miracles with the restrictions of raw and vegan cooking, serving up sushi (without the fish), enchiladas (without the meat), pizza (without the cheese, or the traditional crust) and pasta (without the ... pasta ... check it out).

Cafe Gratitude also offers organic beers and wines, smoothies and and assortment of juices from the hardcore wheat grass to a more palatable grapefruit, mint and fennel combination. And if you're feeling really inspired, you can convince yourself the beet juice you ordered is really wine (they serve it in a wine glass).

Yes, you feel healthy when you leave Cafe Gratitude, but the main takeaway here is that the food is simply scrumptious. I avoided this place for the longest time because I'd never had an especially good vegan meal before. Now I go there all the time because the food is just so good; the health benefits, a bonus.

Easy on the legs, easy on the eyes and easy on the landfill.

Looking for a way to go green in your bathroom, without following Sheryl Crow's one square of toilet paper dictum? These Preserve razors may help ease your consumer conscience. The handle is made entirely from recycled plastic, 65% of this comes from recycled Stonyfield Farm yogurt cups. Now, why didn't I think of that???

Preserve also makes other products, such as toothbrushes, from recycled plastic. What's really nice about the razor, though (the only one of its products that I have yet tried) is that, IMHO, it's superior to those nasty disposable razors made of hard, brittle plastic. Preserve razors have a soft, almost rubbery touch and they come in pretty colors. Basically, I'd buy them even if they were not a green product.

Global warming and UFOs in a dead heat

Some people wondering why global warming isn't being talked about more in the ongoing U.S. presidential election and debates have started keeping score.

The tally: Of the 2,769 questions the major television networks had asked all the presidential candidates as of this count, well into the election season, just three of them were questions about global warming. That's the same number of questions that were asked about UFOs, following Dennis Kucinich's claim that he'd encountered one.

As someone who's pretty cynical about the political process, I am still rather stunned by that figure, and it's worth stressing that I'm quoting a conservative count: other stats I found showed UFOs garnering a lot more attention than global warming. I guess the biggest surprise for me is that one of the most talked-about subjects this year is illegal immigration. Not to dismiss that, but why are we so concerned with people crossing our borders and not with our coastlines potentially being eradicated by glacial melt?