Catherine Li

One thing that I’ve been trying to do is learning to mend clothes and to do some basic sewing. Recently I found a shirt that I’d been planning to discard because there was a hole on the shoulder seam, but instead decided to roughly patch up the hole, then follow a YouTube tutorial to cover my stitches with a couple of small embroidered flowers. I’m not sure I would wear the shirt out in public or at a semi-formal event again, but I’ve returned it to a state where I’ll definitely wear it at home, and I’ll be able to get a few more years out of it. For clothes that have been worn to the point of no repair, I’ve also been trying to give them a new life by cutting out the portions of fabric that aren’t hole-y and hemming the edges so I can use them as handkerchiefs/washcloths. Overall it's been a nice way to keep my hands busy while reducing the amount of fabric I add to landfills, and it means I can buy fewer new clothes.

One Friday last quarter I woke up, realized that I needed to do laundry that morning, and that I had to leave my apartment building in an hour. Because I didn’t want to get called out for leaving my laundry in the dryer for too long, and I didn’t want my clothes to get dumped unceremoniously in some corner of the laundry room while I was gone, I decided to wash, then just air-dry all of my clothes instead. Ever since, I’ve rarely used the dryer; I don’t have to wait the extra 45 minutes to dry my clothes, I’m saving electricity, and I save $1.25 each week. It’s a win-win because it’s a convenient way to reduce my energy usage.

Ever since moving into the university apartments this school year, I’ve been meal planning for myself. At first, the prospect of deciding what to eat and then preparing every single meal was a bit daunting, but I find that having a spreadsheet to visualize how to distribute my groceries has made it much easier to plan out what to cook. I’ve found that meal planning has helped me waste less food, since I can plan better to buy only what I need, and I have better records of what I still have in the fridge and can thereby remember to eat food before it expires. It’s also made me a bit more mindful of what I eat and how much I eat—having everything listed out makes me aware of what and how much food I’m feeding myself. Seeing the lack of variety in my diet (e.g. napa cabbage every week for the past three weeks) has forced me to step outside my comfort zone somewhat and choose some foods that I normally wouldn’t. I don’t think that this is a process that works for everyone—it works for me because I can eat the same thing for three days in a row and not become sick of it—but nonetheless I find it an excellent way to more regularly take care of myself.

For the past couple of weekends my diet has been (unintentionally) vegetarian. I’ve been feeling lazy and often forget to thaw any meat the night before, so I have been making tofu instead. It doesn’t make much of a difference in how I felt physically—tofu is a regular part of my diet, albeit usually cooked with meat—but I am really pleased that I don’t have to deal with fat or viscera, or worry about giving myself food poisoning by accidentally ingesting raw meat water or not cooking the meat for long enough. Tofu is one of my favorite forms of protein, and I know a number of ways to cook it, so I don’t find myself missing meat at all. Moving forward I plan on substituting out meat for tofu more often; its sheer convenience, its comparatively low carbon footprint, and knowing that soy protein contains all the essential amino acids justifies its presence in my diet.

Something that my family would often do is to save any water used in the kitchen and reuse it at least once. We eat a lot of vegetables, and with vegetables comes multiple washes to remove the dirt and the occasional dead insect trapped in the leaves, so the water used to wash them, or to blanch them, builds up. Because water can be expensive, we would collect all of the used kitchen water and use it to water our garden (but it can also be used to flush the toilet!). I can’t attest to how much our water bill actually changed with this practice, but I still recommend it if conditions allow because it seems to have increased the harvests from our fruit trees.

Now that I live in an apartment with limited places to store buckets of water and even more limited access to a garden, it has become difficult to reuse all of the water from cooking. Nevertheless the practice of trying to reuse sticks; I find myself using vegetable washing water to soak a dirty pot rather than just pouring it down the drain, or otherwise being more conscientious about water use in general.