Today is America Recycles Day! Why not do some recycling? Sure, I didn't cut down any trees to create these posts, but I think they're in the spirit of the day. Here are my two favorite posts from the past year.

Selling you a farm-fresh lifestyle in a box, bag or can

... By far my favorite image in any book is the overleaf of Blueberries for Sal, a bucolic and all-blue illustration of Sal and her mother. They are canning blueberries in a 40s-era kitchen, complete with hand-cranked egg beater, polka-dot curtains, and a cast-iron wood cooking stove. Every time I gaze at that picture I believe for a second that I will go downstairs and preserve something in one of the old-fashioned Ball jars I found at a garage sale.

Alas, it never quite happens that way, but just reading the book makes me feel connected to the farm-wife ideal. Much like a wander through today's grocery store aisles. As Kim Severson mentions in today's New York Times, she feels smug when she puts a bag of Cascadian Farm organic French fries in her grocery cart (she calls is "greenwashing" and the marketers call it "an authentic narrative"): "a gentle image of a field or a farm ... suggest[s] an ample harvest gathered by an honest, hard-working family." And in creating these images for us, in selling us the hard-working farm family, marketers know that just for a minute we've left our wired, fossil-fuel-guzzling lives for a hand-hewn pine kitchen table in that log house in Maine.

In short, we're being sold our ideal lifestyle in a box, bag or can. My ideal lifestyle shines like autumn sunset on the matt label of Pepsico, Inc. (NYSE:PEP)'s Lay's new Natural line of baked chips and Cheetos (natural Cheetos?!?), it smiles on me like the friendly cows on the label of Brown Cow's Cream Top yogurts. ... read more

Cage-free eggs: What are you paying for, and are they better?

No, not that spare tire. This isn't going to be a just another blog post about diet and fitness -- you're not that lucky. This is about actual nasty, filthy old junk tires and what we're doing about them. Of course, I'll intersperse some investment ideas for your consideration, but basically I'm just talking trash. A few of our readers would say that for me, that's just par for the course.

An article at Phillyburbs.com revealed that last year, of the approximately 300 million tires discarded, 261 million were recycled in some manner. Most of the remaining slugs were properly processed for landfill or are sitting in piles over at my neighbor's place waiting for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to say something about it (again). Suffice it to say that in the area of tire recycling, for the most part, we have taken up the challenge and we are doing something about it.