Kilimanjaro – GO LOCAL!
I was able to climb Kilimanjaro first and that deserves its own blog post, but for those of you trekking out there anytime soon who are concerned with hiring local people and giving back to the local communities – I highly recommend Eligius Minja as a guide (you can connect with him via my Facebook page or just search him on Facebook as a travel guide in Tanzania (http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g293750-i11370-k6225647-Climb_Kilimanjaro_with_local_operator-Kilimanjaro_National_Park_Kilimanjaro_Region.html).  

Eligius is a member of the Chagga tribe in Tanzania.  He was born and raised in Tanzania and you can’t get any more local.  He guided me up and down the mountain with a team of locals and my experience was wonderful.  I also recommend Mango Safaris over the more expensive (Abercrombie, etc.) - http://www.mangoafricansafaris.com - because they work with locals and are committed to protecting and preserving the environments they go to.  

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.32696553587.40398.727313587&type=1&l=4436c7ca54

Meal Ideas and Ingredients Delivered – Easy Breezy?

For those who don’t know, Plated is a delivery service that you subscribe to, like Blue Apron (which I haven’t tried), that sends you recipes and ingredients to cook meals at home.  I love the idea of having dynamic different meal ideas handed to me on a silver platter, along with all the necessary ingredients in one fell swoop – no grocery shopping! – so I randomly chose Plated from among the different service providers and gave it a whirl.  The website was fairly easy to navigate.  They asked me what my food preferences and taste preferences were.  I actually wished they’d asked me more questions because my recommended menu contained food items I am allergic to but I was still gung ho.  I selected my menu and was told the food items and recipe cards would be delivered on a Monday and could be cooked for dinner Monday or Tuesday.

SO MUCH PACKAGING AND WASTE!

True to their word, Plated delivered a box of recipe cards and ingredients to my doorstep, however, imagine my shock when I opened it to find thick plastic cushioning as long as a child sized human being wrapped around all of the produce and grains, each of which was in tiny, individual plastic bags.  I’m talking a separate plastic bag for a single bay leaf.  Yes, one single bay leaf.  The amount of plastic bags was astounding.  To give you an idea, the plastic bags from my delivery filled an entire 4 foot tall trash canister.  There were also giant freezer packs.  That would be ok if I could keep them and re-use them but they were so big they wouldn’t even fit in my freezer – at least, not if I wanted to have food in there, too.  There were also about a million little plastic bottles, including several to hold just infinitesimal dollops of liquid seasonings.  If I were to throw them away, I’d feel like a jerk.  I was able to recycle them (unlike the plastic bags – read on for why not) but not without a maximum expenditure of effort, rinsing and drying each tiny bottle so the recycle people would take it.  With all the time I spent rinsing and drying those little suckers, I could have just run to the corner store and bought myself the groceries or looked up a recipe on my own.

Plastic Bags Can’t be Recycled if Dirty or Wet

So what about those plastic bags?  Why not recycle them?  Not going to happen.  The plastic bags were wet with condensation from the veggies within and had bits of food particles on them – making them pretty much impossible to recycle.  Bags and wraps have to be clean and dry to be recycled, and collecting them in curbside bins with bottles and containers generally leaves them too dirty and wet to be recycled.  See http://www.plasticsrecycling.org/faqs/plastic-film-recycling-faqs.  Also, most frozen food or pre-washed salad bags may contain a barrier polymer or other additives that is not the polyethylene (#'s 2 and 4) plastic that recyclers want. These polymer barriers help protect the food and extend shelf life but recyclers consider them to be a contaminant in the recycling bin. See id.

The huge thick plastic mattress (I can’t think of another word to describe it) that wrapped everything in the box is definitely not recyclable. 

It All Adds Up

If I used this service weekly (or more!) as suggested, the amount of waste I would create is astounding…and horrifying.  I canceled my subscription immediately.  I don’t mean to just pick at Plated; this is an issue endemic to the individual meal delivery type of service.  All you have to do is Google: "Impact of landfill on the environment" and you’ll see the problem is a pretty big deal.  To be fair, one writer really researched another provider, Blue Apron, and found, in some cases (like if you’re buying frozen food dinners), Blue Apron might not be as bad for the environment as those frozen dinners from the grocery store.  See http://www.onearth.org/magazine/home-cooking-delivered-meals for really great and very fair (I thought) write up.

The Solution

I’m taking a page from the online magazine I cite above and doing two things: I am going to use these delivery services but not as a subscriber.  If I’m in need of a fresh new recipe idea and I’m in the doldrums about what to cook, I’ll go to their website and check out what’s on “today’s menu,” then I’ll take their idea without ordering their insane packaging (sorry, guys), walk not drive (no carbon footprint there) to my grocery store (yes, I know not everyone can do that but I’m lucky I can) and pick up the ingredients, trying to go local and organic and steering clear of excessive and unrecyclable packaging.  It’s really not so bad.  You can check out their menu idea at work and swing by the store on your way home.  A lot of their stuff is intentionally simple so almost anyone can make it which makes commandeering the recipe that much easier.  You actually don’t even need to steal recipes from the delivery service people.  There are awesome ones all over the Internet.  If I am feeling “savory” and “crunchy” foods, I’ll literally Google “savory and crunchy recipes without meat” and get a veritable smorgasbord of ideas, most of which are pretty easy and don’t require crazy shopping.

That’s my take on an ethical and beautiful dinner.  ;)

In my capacity as the President of the Film Lab, I gave introductory remarks at the Launch Party of the 72 Hour Shootout Filmmaking Competition last night (watch it here).  The Shootout is an annual competition, ongoing for 11 years now, that promotes gender and ethnic diversity in mainstream media.  Every year, we choose a topic that we think deserves attention and discussion in the entertainment world and, this year, the Shootout Coordinator chose the topic of "beauty."  Ahhh, beauty.  Such a lovely word but, too often, with such negative connotations in the wilds of Hollywood.  I found myself doing a lot of research on beauty, interviewing everyone from runway models to Hollywood makeup artists to your average Jane and Joe on the street.  Here is a (condensed) transcript of the speech I gave last night in the hope that you, too, can derive some benefit and knowledge from that research:

Hello and welcome.  I’m Jennifer and I’m the President of the Film Lab.  For those of you who followed the Shootout last year, you know we focused on the theme of colorblindness and the importance of perception in the media – the conscious and unconscious assumptions all of us make everyday based on the superficial appearance of others and their presence - or lack thereof - in media.  The lack of presence of people of color in mainstream media creates a perception we don’t exist and the fact that, when we are portrayed, it is so often via negative stereotypes, created, for us and for the Shootout filmmakers, a mission to combat that through creating positive and prolific perceptions of people of color in the media.  This work has only become more important as percentages of, for example, Asian Americans, on network TV are actually on the decline.  Down roughly 3% even as our population increases.

This year, we continue with our work to change mainstream perceptions through media and in 2015 our focus is on the concept of beauty.  Yes, beauty, with all its racial, social and gender connotations.  What is beauty?  Is it a biologically programmed imperative about symmetry and youth and health?  Is it a socially and culturally programmed perception about white skin and thin bodies?  I think it is a little bit of both but what I know is that whether or not we are perceived as “beautiful” significantly impacts our lives.  Much like when we make snap judgments about others based on race, we do the same thing based on gender and on perceived beauty.  Beauty, as a top runway model has said, is superficial and immutable and yet powerfully impacts the way we are treated by our society regardless of our inherent kindness, compassion, morality, or intelligence – characteristics that most of us would agree are far more important than “beauty.”  Model Cameron Russell said people pay costs or get favors based on how they look, not who they are; and American mass media creates stylist constructions of ideals in their photos of models, not actual images of the people those models are.  Is that a bad thing?  I suggest to you that it probably is when nearly every model is photoshopped into body proportions that are genetic abnormalities because they are so rare, when nearly every mass media image of beauty is a white person (less than 4% of professional fashion models are non-white),  and when 78% of 17-year-old American girls of all races say they don’t like their bodies.  In some ways, it’s a brilliant marketing ploy.  If advertisers can get us to believe the gold standard for beauty is a genetic abnormality that will be impossible, on a biological level, for us to achieve, there is no end to the money we will spend on products and services we hope will take us one step closer to that unreachable goal.

I’d like to say I don’t care whether you think I’m good looking and that I take no effort to appear “attractive,” but rather focus on being a smart, strong, healthy, and good person.  If I told you that, though, my very footwear would reveal me to be a liar.  Today, I voluntarily chose to hobble myself.  I intentionally put on shoes I cannot run in, find painful to walk in and cannot even stand in for long periods of time.  I chose to wear contraptions that cause me physical pain and that no podiatrist in the world would recommend because I bought into the mass media message that these shoes are beautiful and that they will lengthen the line of my leg and that long legs are beautiful.  To be fair, I think many people in this room have, at some point, engaged in similar behavior.  Why did we do that?  For a lot of reasons, but one is because people treat those the media teaches us are attractive better in the first instance.  Study after study shows we will hire, trust and give favors to those considered “attractive” over those we do not based on nothing more than their pretty faces.  They might be serial killers with people chained in their basements while the wrinkled old lady applying for the same job is a saint, but it doesn’t matter.  Statistically, the hot serial killer is probably going to get the job.  Good looks will open a lot of doors, get you a lot of get out of jail free cards and unfairly stack the decks in your favor – kind of like being a white man.   Which brings me to gender. 

Women, particularly, are constantly bombarded by media messages to be younger, skinnier, more “beautiful” and that creates a gender divide in which, culturally, women are judged more than men on whether they are aesthetically pleasing rather than on their brains or their abilities.  I’ll just throw out two real life examples of that.  I first came on as President of the Film Lab in 2012 and someone who shall remain nameless wrote a message saying the president of the Film Lab should not be a woman because (1) the Asian community is very conservative and wouldn’t take a woman in a leadership role seriously; and (2) filmmakers are predominantly men so we need a man for a president.  I did with that message what I do with all non-constructive criticism – I put it away to remember and took action to teach the writer a lesson through my conduct and my work about just how wrong he was and is.  This year, we hired an amazing Shootout Coordinator.  She is a professional videographer, editor and photographer.  She is the best person for the job.  She also happens to be a she.  In fact, it appears that she is the first ever female Shootout Coordinator – the first female in the Shootout’s 11-year-history.  As Shootout Coordinator, she reached out to many organizations, sponsors and companies and she encountered some situations, one of which I will share.  She went in to speak to a high level entertainment executive about the Shootout whose name I won’t reveal and whose gender I won’t reveal.  Don’t jump to conclusions and assume it was a man.  Women are just as capable of men of reaching sexist conclusions.  The Shootout Coordinator met with this executive and, at the end of the meeting, the executive asked her who would be doing the final editing of the premiere and overseeing the technical aspects of the Shootout.  When she said, “Me,” she got laughter, derision and raised eyebrows, followed by a series of low level, condescending questions – like “Sweetheart, do you know what a boom mic is?” - meant to test her technical knowledge.  To my knowledge, that’s never happened to any of our past (male) Shootout Coordinators.  When she told me about the experience, I was not pleased but she was very calm and she said, “You know what Jen?  It’s our opportunity to teach this person and everyone like this person a lesson about who we are and what we are capable of.”

So now the filmmakers in this room are about to create media; entertainment that may be shown at festivals from New York to Los Angeles, broadcast on television and blasted out online across the globe.  To use the words of Shootout judge David Elliott, the filmmakers will become Gods.  They will have the ability  to create any world they desire.  So, what world will they build?  One like our own that judges and rewards based on some concept of skinny, white beauty?  Or a new world?  Will they create “beauty” made up of compassion and intelligence…people who are little people, disabled, Asian, Black, Latino, multi-racial?  For the next 72 hours, they will have the power to create any message they wish in any world they want to imagine.

Make no mistake, societal ideals of beauty encompass a legacy of gender and racial oppression through their omission of people who don’t conform to the skinny, symmetrical, white model and, in doing so, create a world in which the majority of us are marginalized for meaningless, unchangeable characteristics.  

Ethical is beautiful.  Be beautiful.

I had the incredible opportunity to go to the Maldives and stay in a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in the Indian Ocean, diving, for two weeks.  The beauty was unparalleled.  It was truly the experience of a lifetime.  I even got to film a short there about the importance of preserving marine habitats, which was amazing.  I met wonderful people, learned a little of the local language and about the local customs on the various different islands, swam with mantas, sharks and spinner dolphins out in the "wild" - on their terms, not mine.  This blog post, however, isn't really about all the poetic awesomeness of the trip.  Instead, I thought I'd share a series of funny goofball stories about the little things that provide the comedy in the postcard setting:
1.  Sometimes Fish Attack
We were diving with beautiful 6' reef sharks and it was a still and serene experience.  No aggression there.  Littler fish, however, got a little - ok, a lot - hostile with my dive buddy.  We were swimming along, admiring all the gorgeous marine life when a really large fish – we’re pretty sure it was a Jackfish (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/298681/jack) - made a beeline straight for my buddy's face.  At first, he looked happy and you could just see him thinking, “Aww, how nice.  The fish isn’t scared of me.  She wants to say hi to me.”  But, as the fish sped up and torpedoed for his face with a look of complete hostility in its little fish eyes, my dive buddy's happy look changed from "aww, how cute" to concern to fear to terror.  The fish literally bulldozed into his face while he first attempted to  swim backwards in a complete and ungraceful panic, and then started flailing all over the place.  As much as one can laugh underwater, I was laughing.  It was hysterical.  We pulled back and the fish went still, floating and staring at us like it was a standoff.  I bet she was guarding something.  We had to make a huge circle around her.  I don’t think I will ever forget an able bodied male flailing and silently screaming as he tried to escape the little fish of doom!  It was fabulous!
2.  Vinegar = Miracle
One dive, we got caught in a really strong current.  I got bashed against the rocks repeatedly and got some war wounds on my legs and feet.  We literally had to let all the air out of our BCDs and crawl along the ocean floor until we could start a safe ascension.  When I got back up on the boat, I had blood all over me.  It definitely looked a lot worse than it actually was.  The boat crew was totally freaked out and one of the women ran and got the First Aid kit, which contained a clear bottle.  She poured the contents of the bottle over the wounds and it stung like a mother.  The next day, they were in great shape!  I asked what the magical stuff was from the First Aid kit that fixed me so well and she laughed.  It was just plain old vinegar!  Now I know.

And Then There's The Post Trip Amusement ...
1.  My Hairdresser Is In Mourning
Two weeks of diving every day in salt water under a tropical sun made my hair feel like straw and somehow, I always manage to get my hair in knots and tangles on every boat ride and every dive.  On one dive, it got so tangled into the back of my mask, we had to find a scissors and hack it off.  This doesn't bother me at all although I admit I have these bizarre layers in my now straw-like hair so, when I went back to the States, I went in to get a haircut and fix it.  My hairdresser combed out my hair and just stared and stared.  He murmered, “Oh.  Oh.  Oh no.”  And looked like he wanted to cry.  I found myself in the ironic position of being the one comforting him, telling him, “Hey, don’t worry!  I will just deep condition it; it’s ok.  Hey, don't cry.  Want to see a picture of my dive buddy being attacked by a goldfish?  Please don't cry.”

2.  My Aesthetician Is In Mourning or Else I'm Pregnant
Let's not start rumors.  I am not pregnant.  I went in for a facial after the 20 hours of traveling (including the layover) back to the States.  I thought it would be great to get a thorough cleansing on a professional level.  The aesthetician took one look at me and nodded, asking knowingly, "Are you pregnant?"  Shocked, I was wondering if maybe I seriously over-ate on the way home.  Aloud, I said, "Ummm...no...why?"  She was like, "All the hyper pigmentation on your face!  I thought it was due to pregnancy."  Huh.  And I just thought I had a tan!