Green Options

My bookshelves creak with the weight of my amassed food preservation resource collection.  As we grow over 70 percent of our food needs on our Wisconsin farm and B&B, Inn Serendipity, the how-to behind stocking up has always been area of personal, passionate research.

But as you can see, I’m already overloaded with info.  Do I need another food preservation book?  Not really, until I read Sharon Astyk’s latest book:  Independence Days:  A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage & Preservation, a new release from the fine folks at New Society Publishers.  Lots of books, those on my shelves included, successfully detail the “how” of food preservation, from water bath timings to prolific pickling techniques.  Independence Days freshly blends “how” with “why,” serving up a modern take on stocking up and why this plays a vital role in our future survival as a planet.

Astyk’s approach, blending practical information and big picture context with a hefty dose of personal anecdotes and essays, nurtures readers into realizing they are doing more than creating a January supper when one puts up tomatoes in July.  We’re collectively part of a larger, strategic, hands-on revolution in kitchens across America to change the way we approach food, sustainability and life.

Here’s a sampling of fresh, inspiring perspectives I harvested from Independence Days:

“Mom, I’m tired of the same thing every day.”

My kid is in pre-school. Clearly I have hit a rut with lunch box creativity when the single-least adventurous eating demographic is griping. Must be time for some inspiration. Or just more time. Packing lunches is tough, to get specifically “lunch” items, it means adding a third more cooking to your life. That said, with what passes for the average school lunch, it’s time well spent.

Jennifer McCann’s second book, Vegan Lunch Box Around the World, may offer some creative inspiration not just for vegans, but for all of us brown bagging, or reusable, BPA-free bento-ing, these days. Kids, too. The recipes are described as menus for a different country, state or region covering places as diverse as from Kansas to Morocco. Many of the recipes sound intriguing, including Stuffed Dates, Moroccan Tagine, Palak Paneer, and a Basil Salad with Lime and Curry Dressing. These are well worth exploring, especially given the large following of McCann’s award-winning blog “Vegan Lunch Box.”

Just like many other social phenomena that are good for the environment, the exploding trend of people growing their own chickens in the backyard has its naysayers.  Naysayers come in a wide variety of stripes.  For example, the widespread understanding that global warming is real and that we’re causing it has its naysayers, many of whom stand to lose a lot of money when their oil and coal has to internalize the cost of the pollution they’ve been making us pay for since their inception.  Or those that say that electric cars are not realistic…sure there are naysayers…wait, is there a trend here that the oil industry is against everything good?  Hmm…

But I digress.  Suffice it to say, there are naysayers who don’t want us to live well, to live with a lower carbon footprint by producing our own food.  Kimberly Willis and Rob Ludlow, co-authors of Raising Chickens for Dummies, can be counted among those that are dispelling these myths and empowering the people. 

In the 1930s, Americans still ate mostly local, seasonal food prepared in traditional fashion. That was all soon to change. The national highway system enabled goods to travel across country quickly. Refrigerators and freezers were becoming commonplace in ordinary homes. Madison Avenue found new advertising techniques to convince consumers to buy processed, packaged foods. Old traditions were dying out fast and the unique flavors of the different regions of the United States would soon find competition with the blander, more uniform flavors of chain restaurants.

The Work Projects Administration assigned writers to document local recipes and food customs from all over the United States in an effort to preserve a moment in history — as well as employ writers who would otherwise have starved during the Great Depression. The writings were to have been collected in a single volume called America Eats, but with World War II, the economy improved and writers no longer had to be dependent on the government for employment. The notes and essays sat in storage for many years. Mark Kurlansky, author of many acclaimed nonfiction books, including Cod and Salt, selected several of the writings from America Eats for the The Food of a Younger Land.

You can get legal advice, accounting services, marketing consulting and more.  But sometimes the key to entrepreneurial success is just stick-to-it-iveness.  Where do you turn when the whole process of running your own business (or getting one off the ground) is just overwhelming? One place is a book.

Tuesday, Tina Seelig spoke at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco about her new book “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20“, and her words can be a great reminder of how fun (and important) being an entrepreneur is, if your motivation or energy ever diminishes.

Seelig’s first point is that problems are opportunities; bigger problems are bigger opportunities. Playing a video clip of Vinod Khosla saying something to the effect of, “No one is going to pay you to solve a small problem.” So, if you’re overwhelmed, it could be a good sign. You may have taken on a very worthwhile opportunity.

You can see other videos of speakers at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, which Seelig heads at ecorner.Stanford.edu. A free Stanford education!

Finally, it’s in my hands.  I’ve been waiting for what feels like EONS for my copy of Food, Inc. (Edited by Karl Weber) to arrive.  I first laid eyes on this delightful book on a shopping trip to Whole Foods Market and was prompted by husband to not buy it that day because surely we could get our hands on it for less.  Once again, he was right.

The book is a companion to help one further explore the issues raised in the documentary, Food, Inc. Starring Eric Schlosser and directed by Robert Kenner.  I haven’t yet had the opportunity to watch the documentary, but I’m near to frothing and not sure I can wait for it to hit DVD and my Netflix queue.

The companion book contains 13 essays to explore the facts behind the problems we see in the news every day, issues like hunger, human rights, tainted food and pollution.

Clean Plates NYC is the only nutritionist and food critic approved lifestyle book and guide featuring the healthiest, tastiest and most sustainable restaurants in NYC for both vegetarians and carnivores. With plans to expand to other cities and focusing on restaurants using local, organic and sustainably raised plant and/or animal products, this informative and easy to use book will change the way Americans dine out.
Jared Koch is the creator and co-author of this guide designed for busy people on the go. It introduces its readers to the concept of bioindividuality as well as the pros and cons of different dietary theories and types of foods encountered at restaurants.  The book provides practical tips and information on how to implement healthier and more sustainable eating into any budget, diet and lifestyle without sacrificing taste for nutrition.

“Jared’s nutritional advice in Clean Plates has the power to transform your individual health and our collective well-being.” Deepak Chopra, M.D., chairman and co-founder of The Chopra Centers for Wellbeing.

For most people, the beginning of summer is marked simply by Memorial Day weekend. I, on the other hand, need something more: Ice cream. More specifically, a scoop of ice cream in a sugar cone on a warm, sunny day. Being vegan, I wasn’t super interested in the ice cream run my family took to the local Dairy Bar over the holiday weekend, but that’s OK, because as of today, I can make my own ice cream. The Vegan Scoop: 150 Recipes for Dairy-Free Ice Cream That Tastes Better Than the “Real Thing” is finally available!

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.

Earth Day takes place this April 22nd.

As a green leader or entrepreneur, the day begs the question, what will you be doing?

In a mad public relations world that anchors on events as a tangible “touch point” in lieu of diving into the messier (and harder to track or control) world of ‘awareness’, Earth Day is one of many symbols (i.e. polar bears) we use when speaking to some of the starker and concrete practices of the planet’s ecological anxieties.

Noted fiction author Barbara Kingsolver takes a non-fiction tact in her most recent book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and documents her family move to a farm in rural Appalachia and attempt to grow all their own food for an entire year.  The book touches on issues ranging from food sustainability, food networks, and how the food choices of just one family can impact the local food system.

Kingsolver attempts to document the attempt to eat completely local food for an entire year, and does it in a collaborative effort with her family.  One of the unique features of the book is the inclusion of her spouse and children in the writing process.  In each chapter, her husband Steven Hopp adds poignant commentary about social and environmental issues in short diary entries, and her teenage daughter Camille integrates personal anecdotes, canning ideas and seasonal produce recipes.  Having each family member (with the exception of her grade school daughter) contribute to the writing process gives the book a more intimate, personal feel and it demonstrates the cohesiveness of their family as they strive toward their common goal.