Entries by Deirdre Dolan

Another reader in search of raw milk:

I read in your blog that you, too, cannot travel to far-away farms to purchase your products. You also said you are forbidden to give info on how you do purchase them. But, can you give a HINT??? I live on Long Island, these farms are 500 miles away, can't possibly travel weekly or even twice a month. I have an autoimmune disease, and heart disease, and I am a passionate raw milk advocate.

I get my raw milk from a collective ...

This week a reader in New York City writes:

OK so we just moved into this apartment and there is a dry cleaner on the ground floor. The vents for the dry cleaners are right on the part of the sidewalk that we have to walk past to get to our entrance. So it's like being showered in dry cleaning chemical nastiness every time we walk by. The vents are about 6 feet off the ground so it's high for a stroller, but pregnant moms will have to soak it right in. My questions are: is this legal? (I called 311 and they are sending someone out to inspect it) and the other question is: how toxic is this to walk past at least twice a day? It can't be good.

I know how hard it is to find an apartment in New York City, but this doesn't sound like a great situation. The “chemical nastiness” you're inhaling is Tetrachloroethene (it also goes by tetrachloroethylene, perchloroethylene, PCE or, most commonly, PERC), and it's used to dry-clean clothes (as well as degrease metal parts). It's considered a probable carcinogen by ...

 

For many renters, ensuring that your new apartment is painted with safe, zero-VOC paint before you move in is tricky. Landlords don’t want to spend the extra money, and you have no leg to stand on in terms of getting them to. As a renter myself, I worked out a deal with my landlord-to-be when we signed the lease that I would pay the difference between the paint they would have used on our apartment, and the more expensive no-VOC brand they agreed to paint with instead.

A Daily Green reader with a young child who just moved back to New York City sent us the following question:
 
I just moved into a new rental apartment that was freshly painted and it smells. What should I do to get rid of the VOC's and the smell? Should I run my HEPA filter? What are the dangers of VOC's? I've been keeping windows open as much as possible and it's just the doors that were really newly painted so I'm trying not to freak out completely!

I turn to the Green Depot’s in-house expert Paul Novak for all green home-related questions. I have spoken to Paul a number of times over the years, and he is always thoughtful and helpful. He points out that very few paints/sealants/coatings are truly 100% non-toxic, but he makes it is business to identify the least toxic options out there. 

For the reader’s smelly paint situation, Paul would say that she should first ...

 

My biggest fear in the weeks leading up to the birth of my first child wasn’t missing movies, or fifty hours of labor, or tearing horribly (that was my second biggest). All I kept thinking about, with the kind of dread I used to feel for math finals, was the loss of daily sleep to come. I figured if so many hard things about a new baby never even get mentioned, the amount of talk sleeplessness gets must mean it applies to 99% of parents. And I guess this is because sleep issues are never one-sided. If your baby isn’t eating you still manage to get some dinner, and if she’s crying her eyes out you’re probably mostly just watching her, but if she’s not sleeping peacefully, there’s no way around it, neither are you. I wasn’t into a lot of pre-baby parenting advice and didn’t read a lot of books, but my ears definitely pricked up any time conversations veered towards sleep and sleep tricks. Instead of taking a wait-and-see approach, we adopted the philosophy of Gina Ford, who wrote a book called The Contended Little Baby that freaked any friends who saw it on my table because she’s British and strict.

Ford believes in black out curtains for the nursery, and won’t even consult with parents who don’t have them. Maybe we were being defensive to the point of dramatic, but my thinking was that if I hadn’t tried absolutely everything to make sleep easy for the baby, if she didn’t sleep I wouldn’t know why. I realize now ...

This week I’d like to ask readers for some help. If you’re interested enough in organic pregnancy to read this blog, I’m wondering what questions or concerns you might have that aren’t being answered here. Or, if you don’t have specific questions, what topics you’re interested in that I haven’t yet discussed.

Lexy and I have a top ten list we use as a first line of defense for a healthy pregnancy, but I’d love to know what worries you after the baby is born as well. Are some subjects too hard to get a straight answer about (flame retardants in pajamas, how safe are cell phones, how to see through greenwashing, wooden toys, paper or plastic), so that you end up just avoiding them?

What does this list leave out? What befuddles you? Is it how to find good foods, how to know what foods are good? Is it how to figure out what lotions or clothes are ok, is it finding out which specific retail locations or brands can be trusted? Is it determining which are the really scary things, and which are hype?

If you have questions can you write them to me as comments here, and if you see questions you can answer please do as well.

Thank you.

I tasted a yogurt in Vermont last week that was so good I’m pretty sure my eyes snapped shut while eating it. It was Organic Maple Yogurt (made with Jersey cow whole milk and maple syrup) from Butterworks Farm, a 25 year-old Vermont dairy up near the Canadian border. I’ve never cared much for yogurt, but I got back to New York and couldn’t stop thinking about it, or stop my mouth from watering every time I did. I still have to struggle to eat better so that my daughters will one day do it reflexively, but yogurt's always been an off-putting food to me, I think partly because of it's virtuous reputation. I'm always thrilled when I come across a food where the organic version crushes the conventional version I grew up eating, so I started hunting around for it. I've been feeding my daughters yogurt since they were born, but I was looking forward to feed something I actually like. ...

Trying to navigate daycare in my corner of Brooklyn is probably ten times harder than dealing with getting into college 20 years ago. My older daughter is only 21 months, but I’d like her socialize some with kids her own age come fall -- an idea much easier said than done. Her birthday is in November, so she misses the age 2 September cutoff and will probably have to wait a year to go to most of the daycares and schools that exist within walking distance. This means finding some kind of daycare-preschool alternative, usually an in-the-home situation with mixed-aged toddlers. I went to visit one such situation a few blocks away the other day and thought I’d be pretty relaxed about how organic the environment was. Then I noticed I was holding my breath and not feeling relaxed at all. A lovely Russian woman showed me around and explained how Saoirse would spend her time, but I was counting the seconds until the tour ended and we could get back onto the street. I thought about the list of questions I wouldn’t even bother asking, and that I will share here for your own daycare search. My advice is to email or get them out of the way on the phone before making the pointless schlep: ...

Taking care of small children doesn’t exactly tax the brain. Most days involve a variety of repetitive activities that are far from stimulating, if almost totally mind numbing. Recently I was at a friend’s whose parents live with her so they can be around her kids. Her parents are child psychologists and there are no two more dedicated people when it comes to the face time, but for the mind numbing stuff like laundry, toy sorting and meals, her mother straps on a fanny pack and walks around listening to books on tape. I was pretty impressed when she told me how many books she’d “read” so far this summer because it takes me weeks to creep through page-turning novels. But then on Tuesday I opened up the Science section of The New York Times to find a story making a case for my totally disengaged brain. The idea of the piece was that boredom’s kind of a good thing because “falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative…”

I fled sweaty Brooklyn for the New Jersey countryside last weekend and returned home Sunday night with fresh farm peaches and a hand-me-down car seat from my friend and host. I love free stuff and have to admit I probably wasn’t going to dig too deeply to find out how safe the inherited model was, but then I checked my email and saw that the trusty Ecology Center had just released their second annual car seat toxicity ranking. I went to Healthy Car.org and searched the convertible Britax car seat by model (Marathon Tan Swirl) and was psyched to find it got a pretty low rating for toxicity (0.6). (A very similar seat, the Britax Marathon Onyx, did much worse with a 4.4.)

The non-profit Ecology Center (out of Ann Arbor) is very invested in the struggle for clean air, safe water, healthy communities, and environmental justice, and has included more than 200 of the most popular 2008- 2009 cars and over 60 car seats in their study. The database is exhaustive and easy to peruse, with lists of chemicals, numerical ratings, photos, and explanations of health concerns. The average American spends more than 1.5 hours in cars (gas prices have only reduced driving under 1 percent nationally), so it’s smart to seriously consider the polluted air inside – particularly for kids and their still-developing systems.

I have been faithfully reading your advice on making my house greener and improving my children's lives but I have come to two road blocks.
The first is we are renovating our kitchen but did not order green choices. I looked up plants to put in my house to get rid of the air pollutants but have found that all are toxic to animals and children which does not work for me since I have 2 cats and two young children. What would you suggest I do?
Second, while packing up everything in my cabinets I came to realize that under my kitchen sink I had about 20 bottles of harmful cleaning supplies. I no longer want these in my house but I don't know what to do with them. I can't just throw them away into a landfill and I don't want to continue using them in my house.
Again what do you suggest I do?

In terms of your kitchen renovation, if it’s still ongoing I wonder if there’s any place you could decamp to until it’s complete? Plants can certainly help with airborne toxins, but a safer solution would be to remove yourselves (or at least your small children) and stay with family or friends until they’ve had time to settle and off-gas.

I’m not sure exactly which toxic plants you bought, or if there’s any chance the store would exchange them for non-toxic versions, but we include the following list of indoor plants that are safe for both animals and children in our book. They help filter the air by converting carbon dioxide to oxygen and, apparently, even remove some of the chemicals.

Aleo vera – formaldehyde
elephant ear philodendron – formaldehyde
English ivy – benzene
ficus – formaldehyde
golden pothos – carbon monoxide, benzene, formaldehyde
peace lily – benzene, trichloroethylene
spider plant – carbon monoxide

A critical hurdle was just cleared in California where the threat of raw milk becoming illegal (as it already is in many states) was looming. The Assembly Health Committee voted unanimously for SB 201, the Fresh Raw Milk Act of 2008. They are also close to passing legislation that will codify making it safe and legal, hopefully to be used as a template in other states.

Phthalates (a group of synthetic chemicals that act as a softening agent) have been getting more bad press lately. A recent article in the February issue of Pediatrics about how infants are exposed to phthalates in baby lotions, cream and wipes got me thinking. I’m moving to an apartment with a bigger kitchen in a few weeks and I’ll be able to set up a changing area close to the kitchen sink so that I can hold my daughters under the faucet instead of using wipes. A French pediatrician in lower Manhattan named Michel Cohen recommends this to all his new moms, and a friend of mine said it’s worked for her. "He calls it 'ze waterfall,'" she said. "It gets them way cleaner than wipes, and cuts down on diaper rash." ...

When it comes to buying new furniture I find the more information I have the harder it seems to be to make a decision about what’s completely safe. You can ask a million questions about how something is made, be assured that it includes no toxic glues or pressed wood, and then get it home and find it stinks to high heaven. ...

Phthalates are one of the most common pollutants out there and the more press they get the more paranoid I’m starting to feel about what they may or may not being doing to my young daughters. I can take some measures to keep them away from my 15 month-old – no rubber duckies in our tub – but after hearing about a recent study it’s actually the daughter who’s breastfeeding I’m really starting to worry about. ...

More dirty news to report about the clean industry. According to a report in Environmental Science and Technology, triclosan, an ingredient used widely as an antibiotic and preservative in personal care and cleaning products for the last 45 years, acts as an endocrine disruptor. This chemical amplifies the natural effects of hormones and exacerbates the effects of testosterone.

It can be found in lots of things you probably assume are safe ...