Green Options

Farm Aid: 22 years of great music, supporting farmers, and strengthening America.

In case you’ve been in a cave for the last two decades, Farm Aid is:

The nonprofit organization, whose mission is to keep family farmers on their land, works with organizations to help family farmers thrive through programs that develop local food markets, training, youth education and food awareness initiatives.

Farm Aid promotes food from family farms, helps grow the good food movement and takes action to change the “system”. How? The most visible of the organization’s work is an annual daylong concert featuring some of the top names in music - headliners Willie Nelson, Mellencamp, Neil Young, and Dave Matthews.

The mega-trends of social media and sustainability share plenty of the same DNA.

The Arnold Palmer is an exceptional beverage. It takes two individual beverages, iced tea and lemonade, each very good in their own right, and creates an even better one. That’s how we feel about social media and green living i.e. sustainability.

There is nothing inherently green about social media. The Web 2.0 revolution is driven by code and the Internet as a platform. According to Wikipedia, it describes this as a trend in “technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users.” This is largely a virtual world.

The move toward sustainability, on the other hand, is taking place entirely offline in the actual world. It is about balancing our impact and more wisely managing our natural resources. The United Nations describes it as commitment to “the provision of a secure environmental, social, and economic future.”

As different as they are, these two trends share one key quality: they’re changing the world for the better. They are changing politics, business, culture, and society. In the following we explore 10 ways that the trends of social media and sustainability intersect as well as align.

Special Note: Sustainablog and Max Gladwell are supporting Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C). By clicking this link and signing up for SocialVibe, once featured in our Ten Ways to Change the World Through Social Media, you’ll effectively donate $1 to the cause. We also encourage you to watch the live telecast on ABC, CBS, and NBC, September 5th, at 8:00pm ET/PT.

It’s raining zucchini!

Well, maybe not literally, but it can feel that way at this time in the summer, when home gardens, farmer’s markets and fresh produce aisles abound with these versatile and prolific veggies.

There is something kind of funny about these little green monsters. It could just be the word ‘zucchini’, which by the way has its roots in the very food-associated Italian language. ‘Zucca’ is the Italian word for squash. Not to get bogged down in an etymology thing . . . the point is that zucchini has been party to many silly jokes, such as:

What is a zucchini’s favorite sport?

The fresh berry season seems so short to me. I really try to eat more seasonally and regionally, but I must admit that I buy frozen organic berries to use mostly in fruit smoothies (see below) during the sad non-berry season.

Growing fresh berries may be the most exciting - especially if you have a local bear that becomes familiar with your crop! Until our current house, I’ve always had some berry bushes and enjoyed the picked-off-the-bush freshness of berries for breakfast AND dessert! I tried container strawberries on the deck in the last couple of years, but it was such an unbelievable chore to keep them from the critters, that I gave up, surrendered my succulent beauties to some very happy chipmunks and whoever else was enjoying them.

I love to buy fresh local berries or even pick them myself from some of the U-Pick farms in my area (Northern New Jersey). Knowing that berries often get the worst kind of pesticides sprayed on them, I’m kind of careful of how they’ve been grown. I almost never buy them non-organic out of season in the grocery store as they often come from South America, where they are allowed to use more pesticides. (not sure about current trade laws, but it used to be that we (US) weren’t allowed to use DDT on our own crops, but we still produced the stuff, sent it down to Mexico and S. America, where THEY used it on various crops, and turned around and sent it back to us - this may not be the case any more, but it is so emblazoned in my little mind, that it is very difficult for me to buy any berries from the supermarket that are NOT organic).

Wow. There’s a berry rant for you! Click on to see my favorite ways to eat berries!

Since I will not have the ability to do a serious vegetable garden or have chickens and/or goats and cows at my suburban New Jersey home . . . YET . . . I am very committed to finding locally produced food. For so many reasons I’m a local foodie. Here are a couple of them:

 - the lower carbon impact of supporting food that isn’t ‘big Ag’ produced and shipped across the country

 - I personally enjoy meeting the farmers (whenever possible) and supporting their efforts

 - the food is so much fresher and tastes better to me

 - I simply get great satisfaction in knowing that I’m helping to move towards a more sustainable agriculture system by eating/buying locally

The following list of various ways to find and buy local food is an excerpt from a story we did last May/June in Relevant Times, by Tamara Jean Scully, who is a freelance writer, specializing in agricultural issues. She is a local foods advocate, working with the Foodshed Alliance to support local, sustainable family farming. Tammy is also a part-time farmer, growing perennials, raspberries and minor fruits. tamarajeanscully.com

And you think you’re busy? Zoë Bradbury has three thousand strawberry transplants to plant, two acres of row crops to sow including a diversified mix of everything from carrots to beets to lettuce, thirteen and a half tons of lime to work into the soil for organic fertilizer and a team of draft horses galloping in any day now. And don’t forget the experimental celeriac patch. Add in the role of accountant, office manager and marketing chief and you cook up the range of farmer responsibilities resulting in their annual crazy spring schedule.

The farmers’ market season may not yet be in full swing so we don’t see — nor appreciate — the flurry of farm activity going on across the country as growers get ready to keep us freshly stocked all summer. But Bradbury, a fledgling Oregon farmer starting her growing venture this season, along with thousands of small-scale, family farmers across the country, have been putting in long work days for weeks.

In the vegan cooking classes I teach and the outreach I do, I am often asked how to incorporate "organic" food into our diets without breaking the bank. Since I rarely have a simple answer, I usually start off by saying what I think is a really important thing to keep

Keep in mind that the typical consumer is NOT paying the true cost of food. The meat, dairy, and egg industries, in

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