Disorder du Jour: Carbon + anorexia = carborexia

New words are constantly being invented, but this one caught my attention, "carborexic" and its corollary, "carborexia."

Carborexics are folks whose drive to cut their carbon footprint is obsessive-compulsive.

The New York Times had a piece by Joanne Kaufman on its SundayStyles section on Oct. 19 on carborexics. Featured in it is a Los Angeles area man who occasionally urinates on his lawn to save a toilet flush. When I read that, I had to laugh out loud.

I have touches of OCD in me, but it's hard for me to imagine myself doing something like that. But I will cop to feeling guilty about not using cloth bags for carrying my groceries. I ask for paper bags and use those to hold trash in the kitchen. It's an idea my husband started, and it's worked out quite well. We rarely ever buy plastic garbage bags.

You can no longer access the New York Times piece online for free, but plenty of bloggers have commented on it since its publication. A quick search on Google yields more than 700 results with the word carborexic in it.

The Telegraph has an opinion piece deriding the condition. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/10/23/do2303.xml

The NYT SundayStyles section on any given week is filled with fluffy fun features spotlighting social phenomena, and some would argue bogus trends, backed with nothing more than colorful anecdotes. A Slate columnist recently poked fun at a New York Times Styles piece about a growing number of guys who have cats as pets. http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=read&id=2201764

Nevertheless, I think there is some truth to the idea that carborexia exists among the super environmentally conscious.