Ina Pinkney writes: After years of serving bottled water, Ina’s and other Chicago-area restaurants are now thinking ‘outside the bottle’ and serving only tap water.

While labels may conjure up images of pristine mountain streams, the truth behind the eco-friendly image is that bottled water is bad for the environment.

In 2007, the manufacture of plastic water bottles generated more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions and required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil.

Every year more than 4 billion pounds of plastic bottles end up in landfills or as roadside litter, and while some states have bottle-bill laws that extend to cover bottled water, the recycling rates for bottled water pale as compared to carbonated soft drinks.

For the last three decades, prominent restaurants have been used as a vehicle to promote this sadly wasteful product. And just like consumers, many of us have been lead to believe that what’s in the bottle is somehow safer and more reliable than what is in the tap.

But the restaurant industry is now better educating itself, just like so many of our patrons.

At Ina’s we now know that Chicago tap is more highly regulated than what comes in the bottle. We know also that as much as 40 percent of bottled water actually comes from the same source as tap water. And most of all, we know that here in Chicago we have some of the best tap water in the country.

And in the same way our restaurant is concerned about the source of the food we serve (i.e. we committed to trans-fat free oil years ago; we use only Davidson’s Pasteurized Shell Eggs), our decision to stop serving bottled water derives from a concern about what is happening upstream, so to speak.

In addition to crowding landfills and contributing to global warming, the bottled water industry is threatening local control of public water. To put five dollar bottles of water on tables here, global communities are losing control of what was once considered a basic human right - something you couldn’t put a dollar value on. (03/11/09)
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Deepak Chopra writes: When Michael Steele, the hapless chairman of the Republican Party, lost his bearings and called Rush Limbaugh’s style ugly and incendiary, everyone knew it was the truth. But it was a perfect example of an inconvenient truth. The right wing has long used ugly, incendiary speech the way baseball players use steroids: to artificially pump themselves up. Limbaugh has taken to saying that he wants Obama’s policies to fail because they spell the end of an America based on personal freedom. This isn’t just a grotesque exaggeration; it disguises the very thing the right wing has been doing when it curtailed civil liberties in the name of national security.

Yet I know people who listen to Limbaugh every morning. They don’t believe a word he says. They deplore his rhetorical sins. They detect the whiff of hypocrisy. Basically, they tune in out of sheer incredulity.

Limbaugh has been plowing the field of moral outrage for decades, but unlike Billy Sunday and the other hot-headed radio preachers who cashed in on social resentment in the Great Depression, Limbaugh threw out God. With no religious tradition to anchor himself, he can swing wider. Anything Limbaugh judges against is condemned, not by scripture, but simply by him being pissed off. Whatever Limbaugh hates — however petty, personal, and arbitrary his animus — is ipso facto wrong.

This represents a huge social shift in American values. Before the Eighties there were a handful of right-wing outlets on the air; now there are well over a thousand. They exist purely as steam vents. The common citizen gets to be pissed off by the millions, unrelentingly, without cease or solution, and in return, he is praised. To be outraged is to be morally superior.

The Limbaugh effect fueled the anti-morality of the Bush years. Under ordinary morality, the wretched plight of illegal immigrants, for example, must be considered along with the fact that they are breaking the law. Being poor, illiterate, and desperate, their human condition makes them more sympathetic than ruthless lawbreakers would be. But under anti-morality, if you hate immigrants because they are foreigners who don’t look American enough, the argument is over. Your anger strips away tolerance, sympathy, and regard for “the other.” Hence the almost imperial bearing of Limbaugh, the bland certainty that because he never stops being angry, he never stops being right.

The same goes for a wide range of “others” who mightily tick off Limbaugh’s listeners: Muslims, feminists, people of color, gays, and environmentalists. There’s no need to understand them or try and accommodate their views. Just put them through the wringer of Limbaugh’s perpetual judgment and, poof, there’s no problem anymore. Of course, the whole scheme is delusional. Problems aren’t solved by remaining perpetually ticked off. Accords can’t be reached when you demonize the other side.

By any sane account, Rush Limbaugh is dead weight when it comes to finding a solution to anything. Like Sarah Palin, his spiritual bride, he lurks in the shadow of the human psyche, expressing the dark anger, resentment, jealousy, and vindictiveness that society can never escape. (03/11/09)
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