After much agonizing, I did it. 

February 1st, 2013 marked the first day in my adult life where no newspaper thwacked against my door in the predawn chill. Ignoring the telemarketers trying to woo me back, I’m giving the paper boy a pass and experimenting with new ways to get my news.

Admittedly, newsprint is still my preferred medium, especially with good coffee flowing through my veins, and--listen up, guys I live with--the TV turned off. But chances to chill have become rare.

In the early parenting years, paper reading degenerated to rereading the same sentence 20 times while my coffee got cold. Today, my son needs me less. But life hasn't slowed down and I still hardly ever get to read anything in that focused, beautiful way. As 2012 closed, I faced facts. We were recycling days’ worth of newsprint no one had read and I thought, ‘Why not ditch it and see what happens?’

It’s early days, but so far, getting my news fix is kind of fun. It involves a salad of methods: nightly TV news; online publications and websites; Facebook and real-time chatter with friends; bits of NPR and CBC radio; blazing headlines at the grocery checkout; crunched up notices in my son’s backpack; some print magazines; and the fat papers we grab at the hockey rink on weekends.

Some observers see disaster in this scattershot consumption, that social media especially, is destroying our attention spans and encouraging us to eat only dessert (i.e., let’s skip Syria and go straight to the Kardashian baby bump news).

Other pundits disagree. Traditional newspapers, they argue, claim to contain a balanced day's helping of global news but are actually products of large media outlets with various biases. (I got a perspective on this in the 1990s while volunteering for a year in Kenya in refugee advocacy work. I encountered victims of civil war and genocide, slum dwellers, and street children, as well as amazing grassroots-level activists. A lot didn't get covered back home. As I learned, North American media outlets are simply disinclined to pick up too many offshore stories, no matter how compelling.)

Social media defenders say the digital age is democratizing news, bringing us the type of unconventional and far-flung stories most media outlets have long ignored (an example here is the story of young Pakastani girl Malala Yousafzai which got a tremendous boost on social media).

Is it the better way? I’m still undecided. My paperless news diet is tasty but I haven’t shaken the feeling stuff is going to fall through the cracks. Will a daily paper thud back onto our veranda ever again? That remains to be seen.

How about you? Where do you get your daily news fix? 
Are your habits changing?

I’ve been pitching stories about food waste to magazines for a couple of years with no luck—until now. Later this year I’ll see one published in a parenting magazine. (I’ll link to it when it's out.)

Have we reached the tipping point on food waste? There’s definitely more buzz lately. Last month the UN launched a global campaign to cut the “1.3 billion tonnes of food lost or wasted each year” around the globe. 

In 2010, Jonathan Bloom, a U.S., author and activist — tireless champion of waste reduction—released his book American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It). Imperfect looking (but perfectly edible) produce, like the tomato above, is one of the foods he says most people would toss.

At our house, we got fed up with food waste several years ago after an embarrassing clear out of our freezer. As my husband and I pulled out package after package of food—snowy, unappetizing victims of freezer burn, quite literally gone to waste—I resolved it wouldn't happen again.

It's been a fascinating journey—but way more uncomfortable than I expected. The reasons we waste food aren’t very flattering. Sometimes we’re as finicky as our kids. (Funny looking tomato? I don’t want to eat that.) Or we’re conspicuous consumers. We buy glorious cartfuls of (local, organic) food at all the right shops and markets but waste half of it because, let's get real, we hit the drive-thru three times a week. Or we’re just plain greedy. We want choice, four kinds of bread in the bread basket, even if we've cut back on gluten and only make sandwiches twice a week. (Guilty.)

But other factors are at work too: our hectic lifestyles, and a consumer culture pressuring us to buy, buy, buy. Anyway, whatever's to blame, we all know where it leads—to nasty stuff growing at the back of our fridges, freezers and pantries. The huge takeaway though is that wasting food has big-time environmental, financial and social consequences. As Bloom writes: “Wasting food squanders the oil and water used to produce it, and food rotting in landfills creates climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions.” This is also food that hungry people could have eaten.

The upside? I’ve found turning things around isn’t actually that hard—a little planning here, a little family communication there—and you can save quite a bit of coin too. According to one estimate, the average family of four wastes more than $2,000 worth of food every year. How would you like to spend those savings?

Does food get wasted at your house? Have you found ways to waste less? I’d love to hear about it.

It’s ironic. Just as I’m launching my new website and blog, my son, approaching nine, becomes self-conscious. And assertive. 

“Are you writing about me?” he asks me. (This  isn’t exactly narcissistic since I do write about him a lot.) Then he tells me that if I do, he wants to know about it, and review it first.

Developmentally, this is right on cue. And I did expect this reckoning. But now that it’s here—me with a story to tell (all catlike, guilty feathers sticking out of my mouth), and him, hands-on- hips, calling me out—I realize this is more than a journalistic dilemma. We’ve come to another one of those parenting crossroads. What worked yesterday just doesn’t cut it today. 

His growth tells me, once again that, just as he is changing, I need to change too. What we were so recently, cut-up grapes, and Mommy-and-me classes, that’s gone. His blind faith in me, also evolving. I know something brilliant will rise from the ashes. We will discover how to make it work and it's a wonderful process. But each time it happens, I always feel—mixed in with my pride at his healthy displays of independence—a little stab of mourning. All that giving, then the letting go, ever reassessing and adjusting, such a tricky part of parenting.

I reassure my son that my blog won’t share embarrassing stories about him. In fact, it’s really more about me. When Zach was born, I stepped away from corporate writing to enjoy his early years. Then when he started school, I began to resurrect my freelance writing career. As he made friends in JK and mastered his pencil grip, I wrote query letters and started landing writing assignments.

Today, I’ve got a healthy, and growing, body of work. I’ve created my website to feature that and make it available for clients and readers. Alongside, my blog will expand on the issues I’m writing about, give some of the back story, and ask you to weigh in.

My next blog post (where I don't mention my son at all!!), talks about food waste. I'm passionate about this issue, have just written about it, and let's be honest, I've been guilty here too. Check it out, and let's talk.