Green Options

This morning as I woke up to my clock radio, the one minute Project Green segment came on the Rush Limbaugh leaning KNCO AM. It reported on a recent meeting of California wine growers, all 26 of which are talking preliminary to major efforts to green their operations, product, and packaging.

Somehow this doesn’t surprise me. Vintners are acutely aware of the health of their environment, their plants, and the resulting product. With the refined and particular tastes of many of their consumers, a lackluster wine will lead to lackluster profits. Beyond that though, their customers are, I would venture to guess, more likely to be of the LOHAS mindset, choosing what they consume based on more factors then simply the cheapest available. They want everything they touch to have thought, consciousness, and a lighter impact on the planet factored into them.

How can a wine be green? The grapes themselves can of course be organic, the growing method biodynamic. But what else?

Massage has many important health benefits as it reduces tension and anxiety, increases blood circulation and helps with pain. Massage greatly reduces stress, which leads to most major diseases. When it is integrated into your wellness routine, massage can help you maintain physical, mental and emotional well being. Learn to treat yourself once in a while, just like you do when you go out to dinner, and remember to tip.

Major health benefits of massage include:

• Calms the nervous system and allows a sense of relaxation and well being to set in.
• Massage reduces held tension in the body and eliminates anxiety.
• It Improves blood circulation, and improves how oxygen and nutrients go to the cells, giving you enhanced immune function.

Summer is my favorite time of year. The days are long and perfect for hiking, traveling, going to the beach, or just sitting on the porch. And summer is the season of my favorite fruits: berries, plums, and melons! I grew up picking huckleberries every summer in Idaho and am always on the lookout for wild berries. Free, fresh-picked fruit is always the tastiest, and wild blackberries and plums happen to be just ripening for the picking where I live on the Mendocino coast of California.

We took a walk to the beach the other day through an orchard overflowing with ripe plums. Further on, the path was lined with tall blackberry bushes. Needless to say, we had an excess of blackberries and plums for a while. Add to that the fact that a local organic wine was on sale this week, and I naturally just had to make sangria!

My sister lived in Spain for a semester last year, and I had some amazing sangria when I went there to visit her. Of course she knew a recipe for sangria, which the one below is based on. (Thanks sis!) So, with a little local foraging, some fresh-picked seasonal berries, and some local wine, I made a yummy summer drink that can be adapted for any kind of fruit that’s in season.

The tagline (Green is Good) for Jonathan Rollo’s new Beverly Hill’s based gourmet chopshop, Greenleaf, pretty much says it all. This fast casual company has hit the nail on the head by serving high quality, made to order wraps and salads sourcing all natural and organic ingredients when possible. They also offer Ecotainers and cornstarch based utensils for all to-go packaging.

The menu’s specialty salads, especially the Antioxidant Orchard [...]

The organic & natural beauty market is increasingly saturated with new brands and products, and growing confusion about what’s ok for you and what’s not. Now seems like a good a time to provide a basic outline of what you need to know. In the posts to follow I’ll cover these in more depth but here’s a good starting point:

Natural: Widely defined as any substance harvested or derived from nature and then isolated, processed or purified by a variety of environmentally sound techniques including filtration, fermentation, distillation, expressing and other like processes.

Antibiotic free, cage free, biodynamic, grass fed, pastured, fertilized, free range, free roaming, free roaming, free running, irradiated, natural, no hormones, no chemicals administered, pasteurized, vegetarian fed, high-Omega 3, whole grain fed. All of these labels have been used just to market eggs.

In fact, eggs are the product with the most “eco labels” of all reviewed by Consumer Reports. How do you navigate the sea of label terms and find out [...]

Though I’ve lived in the Bay Area for three years, I don’t drive, and so this past weekend marked only my second trip up to Wine Country. I had some friends in from out of town, and when choosing our itinerary my only requirements were that we visit a few green wineries.

As a friend pointed out to me though, you’re almost more hard-pressed to find wineries that don’t have some sort of green aspect to them, these days. From solar panels, to wind energy, to organic growing standards, wineries are becoming more and more eco-friendly every day.

There are a number of resources on finding green wineries in California. The Bay Area Green Business Program lists wineries both in Napa and Sonoma counties that meet their requirements. You can check out this sustainablog post rating some Bay Area wineries. And though this winery guide from Green Girls LA is a few years old, it’s still fairly accurate and comprehensive.

Of the wineries my group stopped at this past weekend, my favorite by far was Grgich Hills Estate in Rutherford, CA. Don’t let the difficult to pronounce name deter you; Grgich Hills is the only winery in Napa Valley that features exclusively biodynamic wines. When you first start explaining biodynamic processes, you’re met with a lot of skepticism. (As soon as I said “cycles of the moon” I could see eyes rolling in my group.) Fortunately our server at Grgich was able to explain it in a very practical way.

Organic Bouquet was formed in January 2001 with the goal to establish the national market for organic flowers. They have accomplished this by encouraging both small and large flower growers to initiate organic production while creating widespread trade and consumer awareness of the need for organic flowers. Their ultimate goal is to protect the environment and improve farm worker safety by eliminating millions of pounds of toxic pesticides from agricultural usage. Organic

[...]