Green Options

Move over, Eat Local. Kate Heyhoe challenges us to reduce our other food-related carbon footprint — our “cookprint.” Heyhoe’s latest book, Cooking Green, is based on the idea that how we cook can make as much an environmental difference as what we cook.

The book covers many of the current issues like food choices, food miles, food labels and sustainable seafood choices. It also ventures into some new territory with information on reducing packaging waste, greenest kitchen tools, kitchen waste and how to store foods to get the longest life from them.

Sitting across the breakfast table, and the world’s biggest pancakes ever, from Jeff at Sustainablog, we both nod our heads in an observation — green is only going to work if it goes mainstream, becomes normal. An every day thing. Does that mean my tenure is done as a local food activist and writer?

Well, according to AlterNet, it is. In fact, all I have to do now is “Sit Down and Eat.” Well, maybe after I finish planting and pulling weeds, cleaning and prepping the vegetables, cooking, canning, preserving. That’s all. But if it wasn’t a struggle for ALL of us to get local food, to find healthy, sustainable ingredients to feed the world, hey, bring it on, I’d like that as daily life. I could use less time ranting on policy and more time to garden.

Resources and insight after the jump.

Just to be transparent here, I am not a vegan. This doesn’t stop me from exploring Bryant Terry’s latest book, Vegan Soul Kitchen. I like the earthy blend of soul food traditions that Terry creates so well for this book. The twist, of course, is that the collard green recipe doesn’t call for bacon — every recipe is vegan, healthy and layered with flavor.

What you won’t find in this book is a laundry list of the usual recipes. What you will find is recipes for many soul food standard ingredients that Terry has made his very own, giving each a unique spin and a soundtrack to set the mood.  Both the music picks and the rhythm of the recipes vary in composition from pure, simple and soulful gospel to complex jazz arrangements a la Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. This is not your same old cookbook. And I like that. A lot.

Standouts on my list of first to try include, appropriately, the greens that in season right now: Citrus Collards with Raisins Redux, Sweet Sweetback’s Salad with Roasted Beat Vinaigrette, Wilted Swiss Chard and Spinach with Lemon-Tahini Dressing.

No. You don’t have to don a hair net and slop “taco pie” onto plates yourself. But you can take some steps to replace that taco pie with a salad bar of local veggies and grassfed meat. But you have to act fast.

The current stimulus plan allows funding for reform of the Child Nutrition Reauthorization act. Congress is currently setting the funding for this. The funding can help get better foods for school lunch programs, perhaps even local food from area farms, a farm-to-school food program.

Read more to learn how to make this possible for your school.

In the wake of the peanut butter recalls, and well, years of food safety issues, the Senate and House are reviewing bills that will strengthen our food safety laws. Opinions on the bills vary from the positive to fears of what the bills mean for small farmers.

While I plan on reading the actual legislation proposed, and more articles, I also decided to ask a real expert on the subject. Dr. Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics, was kind enough to share some of her thoughts on the topic of how politics impacts our plates. Her groundbreaking book covers such topics as “Undermining Dietary Advice,” exploitation of kids and schools, and the inner workings of food lobbies and their influence on government. I caught up with Dr. Nestle at a Food Policy conference in Kansas City.

BB: In your speech at the Kansas City Food Policy meeting, you mentioned that the issue of food safety is “less of an FDA issue than a Congress issue.” Given the poor track record of the FDA and USDA on food safety, can you explain your comment?

Updates on Obama, Stimulus and Food Policy in Washington

Stimulating an Appetite for More
Just over three percent of the massive stimulus price tag is allocated to food programs including food stamps, meals for elderly, after-school food programs and WIC — the Special Nutrition Supplement Program for Women, Infants and Children. Advocates for food programs and agriculture reform were hoping for more. Read the report here.

“Sustainable” Deputy for the USDA Announced
Sustainable agriculture advocates were justifiably dismayed when Vilsack was nominated as head of the USDA. Vilsack historically had strong support for  agribusiness and ethanol. Now there’s reason for some hope with the nomination for USDA second-in-command, Kathleen Merrigan, currently director of the Agriculture, Food and Environment Program at Tufts. Merrigan was one of the “sustainable dozen” candidates proposed by the group Food Democracy Now. There’s good reason to believe sustainability concerns will be heard in the new USDA administration.

While national policies have left a lot to be desired regarding food safety, states have taken a lot of steps forward to combat food issues. Consider the state and city bans on transfats, New York’s mandate for calorie labeling on fast food menus. Even as the FDA and USDA fail, for many reasons, to step up to protect consumers, individual states are taking action and leading the charge.

Maryland is the next notable state taking action. Two bills have currently been proposed to ban the use of controversial food dyes in the wake of two British studies (PDF) that show some of the dyes may be linked to hyperactivity and behavior problems in children. One of the bills would mandate labeling on the food packages that contain the dyes, and give industry until 2012 to stop using them. The other bill specifically prohibits schools from purchasing, providing and serving any food item that contains the dyes by 2010.

Learn where you can lookup common foods to see which have these dyes after the jump.

Valentine’s Day and chocolate, it’s an ethical eater’s dilemma for certain. All that worry about carbon footprint, fair trade, ogranic. “But, Honey, it wasn’t eco-friendly!” may not help your cause on Feb. 14th with a real chocolate-loving sweetheart. Here’s a relationship that won’t require any compromises: Askinosie. Ask what?

Rare, Single Bean Origins, Even Rarer Ethics

Askinosie is a small chocolate company out of Springfield, Missouri. It’s not exactly tip of the tongue for foodie locations, but to Midwesterners, it’s as local as chocolate can get. The Askinosie bars are all single bean origin, and unique origins at that. Their Soconuso bar is the first chocolate bar consumed outside Mexico in over 100 years that contains beans from this region. Other origins include San Jose Del Tambo, Ecuador and Davao, Phillipines.

Perhaps best of all is that owner Shawn Askinosie not only pays the farmers better than fair trade prices, he shares directly with them 10 percent of the net profits from chocolate made from their farms. Askinosie also works directly with the farmers, no middlemen, to make sure the beans are produced to exacting standards.

There has been a lot of criticism heaved onto China, rightly so, over the use of melamine in foods. Perhaps we should save more of that outrage for closer to home. Three days ago, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy published their findings in association with the Environmental Health Journal study:
Mercury was found in over a third of processed food products tested, the source of the mercury is contaminated high fructose corn syrup.
One of the researchers, Renee Dufalt, led inquiry into the possibility that HFCS contained mercury while working with the FDA in 2005.

The FDA did nothing to inform consumers about the mercury in the last four years.

Two other very common food additives are also manufactured with mercury cell technology; citric acid and sodium benzoate. These additives have not yet been tested.

After the jump don’t miss the list of names to contact including who is making the tainted HFCS, who was head of the EPA at the time, where you can take action, and what you can do.

Even as a bitter cold front is keeping the temperature in the single digits, I am thinking about warmer days. You see, this is the time of year that seed catalogs arrive and I spend winter nights huddled under a comforter, gazing at jewel-toned heirloom vegetables, ordering seeds, and counting the days until the last frost.

It’s fitting then, that I just finished reading Tim Stark’s book, Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer. The writer turned consultant, turned farmer and writer, tells of his own slippery slope from using scrap lumber in a dumpster to build a germination rack, then starting tomato plants indoors in a New York apartment, to his full-on obsessive slide into tackling organic heirloom tomato farming on the land surrounding his boyhood home.