Green Options

Cupcakes are still the dessert du jour, but forget chocolate and vanilla — try the green Matcha Meringue Cupcakes instead. Two secret ingredients give them a delicate green hue — finely grated lime peel and matcha green tea powder, a premium powdered green tea that’s used in the Japanese tea ceremony. Use organic ingredients to make the recipe even greener.

Even though these cupcakes are still a sugary, the addition of matcha green tea powder means each one will boast the benefits of green tea including weight loss, lowered blood pressure, decreased stress levels and increased energy. So when you try the Matcha Meringue Cupcakes recipe, you can feel a little less guilty about indulging.

Many of our Bayview neighbors joined us last weekend to celebrate the second anniversary of the Latona Community Garden. What used to be a smelly skanky debris-filled eyesore, is now a thriving organic community garden. The formerly blighted corner has been transformed into a warm and welcoming public space where neighbors gather, local kids play, and organic food is grown.

Several of the neighborhood kids climbing the walnut tree in the Latona Community Garden.

As some of my colleagues and I wondered Friday (with less people) then Saturday (bobbed and weaved through the packed crowds) through the San Francisco Green Festival 2009 and we put aside any thoughts of the outside the green world bubble with the economic woes, with so many downtrodden uncreative businesses sticking to the old game plan. Here we viewed, tasted and discussed fresh innovative and mostly sustainable ideas.

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From the comment streams and emails I’ve been getting about recent posts, it is clear that many people believe things that are not actually true about the environmental profile of organic fertilizers.  I don’t mean to minimize the challenge we face when it comes to fertilizers, particularly nitrogen fertilizers.  They take energy to make, have the potential to generate the potent greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, and can lead to the pollution of ground and surface waters.  With a “rap-sheet” like that I understand why people are concerned, but there is a catch - without fertilizers we don’t eat much.

Still, there is a widespread belief that “Organic” fertilizers are the solution.  I’ve already blogged about why organic fertilizers are dramatically worse from a greenhouse gas point of view.  Today I want to talk about the water pollution issues and why “Organic” fertilizers are actually a much worse problem from that perspective as well.

Why Nitrogen Fertilizers Can Pollute

The reason that ALL nitrogen fertilizers (synthetic and Organic) are a water pollution threat is that they at some point convert to the nitrate ion (NO3-).  That particular form of nitrogen is very water soluble so the nitrate can move down into ground water or sideways into surface water.  The “Dead Zone” or “Hypoxia zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is driven in some large part by nitrate coming from farms.   There are ways to manage this issue, but first I need to talk about the fundemental challenge of crop fertilization.

I’m probably going to irritate some people with this post.  I apologize in advance because that is not at all my intention.  For those readers that don’t think climate change is a real problem, I respect the fact that there is uncertainty in that science, but if the majority position of climate scientists is true, the stakes in terms of human suffering among the poor are too high not to act.  For those who think Organic farming is the answer, I’m not trying to argue the whole issue here - I just want to talk about the science associated with climate change and farming.  I have spent months reading the scientific literature on this topic.  That science points to some very specific changes in how we need to farm.  If those changes were compatible with Organic I’d be a big promoter.  The short answer is “Organic farming is not the best option from a climate change point of view.”

I know this sounds like heresy in the “Green Blogosphere,” but before you react, please read on.  I agree in advance that the Organic/non-Organic discussion is much broader than climate change.  In fairness, climate change was never something that “Organic” was designed to address either during its origins in the early 20th century or during the development of the USDA Organic rules between 1990 and 2000.  I have no desire to get in the way of Organic growers making a living (including my good friends who grow Organic of the old school category) or get in the way of Organic customers getting what they want.    I simply believe that it is critical that we, the declining subset of people who take climate change seriously, be accurately informed about this issue.  If we believe we “have the answer” for farming when that answer is wrong, that keeps us from continuing to find the real answer.

Focusing on the Major Crops

Because it would be far too complex to discuss this question for all crops,  I’ll only be talking about the “carbon footprint” of the major row crops (see the pie chart above) - the wheat, corn, hay, barley, oats, corn, soybeans, hay, oats, dry beans, lentils… that make up the bulk of our calorie intake, our vegetable protein intake, and our animal feeds for meat and dairy.  Those crops also make up the vast majority of farmed land, so they are what matters for climate change.  Fruit and vegetable crops are extremely important for health and food enjoyment, but not much for climate change.  Organic today is heavily weighted to the fruit and vegetable segment and beyond that, it is extremely small. Actually, all of Organic only represents 2.6MM acres ( ~0.7%  of US cropland), so it has almost no effect on climate either way. This is only a discussion about the widely held opinion that Organic would help in a climate change sense.

Editor’s note: This review is part of the Green Books campaign. Today 100 bloggers are reviewing 100 great books printed in an environmentally-friendly way. Our goal is to encourage publishers to get greener and readers to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books. This campaign is organized by Eco-Libris, a a green company working to green up the book industry by promoting the adoption of green practices, balancing out books by planting trees, and supporting green books. A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on the Eco-Libris website.

Thinking about giving gardening a try? While the traditional growing season has ended in most parts of the US for this year, it’s not too early to start planning for next Spring. You may want to check out books on starting a backyard garden, and there are plenty of them out there. You may also want to find some of the books that offer suggestions and recipes for the produce you grow. And, if you need encouragement to grow organically, there are still more books on that subject.

If you want a book that covers all three of those areas, though, your choices get much more limited. Janette Haase’s From Seed to Table: A Practical Guide to Eating and Growing Green* not only provides readers with gardening instructions and tips, recipes and menus, and essays on the environmental issues surrounding agriculture and food production, but does so in a month-by-month structure that gives you the information you need when you need it.

In 2006 I attended a BIO meeting in Toronto focused on the new bio-based economy.  Oil had just risen to $70/barrel and it was a time when environmental NGOs, biotech companies and even oil companies seemed to be on the “same page” in terms of their enthusiasm for moving to plant-based feedstocks as the perfect alternative to oil dependency.  With the very obvious international security costs of the oil economy, and what were then thought to be unimaginable energy costs, it was a remarkable sort of celebration event for all the alternative energy and materials folks who has suffered under the decades of cheap oil.  As much as I was happy to see such “multi-stakeholder” agreement, I was sad because anyone with an agricultural perspective could see a train-wreck coming.

People were making presentations about cool second generation innovations like “Cellulosic” ethanol from sources like switchgrass or Miscanthus and also about ethanol alternatives like butanol.  People were talking about bio-materials for even things like the auto industry.  However; the side conversations were about the huge boom underway in the corn ethanol industry.  Orders for stainless steel tanks were back-logged two years.  What had started as a local, farmer-cooperative funded industry had become a venture capital frenzy.  I could see that long before the promise of “second generation” biofuels could be realized, corn ethanol would get to be big enough that it would end up fracturing the amazing consensus about the bio-economy that was functioning at that conference. 

Trail mix is a favorite fall time snack of mine. Fun to take on hikes and picnics, it always hits the spot. Try mixing some seasonal seeds in your favorite nut mix to stay healthy this season. Here is a simple recipe with remarkable immune boosting powers.

Sunflower Seeds: Rich in vitamin E, magnesium and selenium, sunflower seeds are high in phytosterols which are known cholesterol reducers.

Pumpkin Seeds: Carve that cute [...]

Designers may brace themselves with glee because recycled threads are coming to market!

German thread maker Amann, with the new Lifecycle Threads brand name, distributed press releases to the trade last August.

Summer may be gone for now, but certain bits of it last on:  memories, vacation photos……new sun spots. 

Several visitors have written to me asking for help reducing the appearance of sun spots and freckles.  Though nothing short of completely avoiding the sun will totally keep spots at bay, being liberal with the sunscreen and choosing a few targeted products will definitely help.

If you feed your little one Plum Organics, here’s a baby food recall you need to know about. The organic baby food company issued a voluntary recall yesterday due to a botulism danger. The only product affected is the Apple and Carrot Portable Pouch, which comes in a 4.22 ounce bag.

The pouches are being pulled from store shelves because of a potential risk of Clostridium botulinum contamination, which can cause botulism, a sometimes life-threatening condition that you clearly don’t want to mess around with.

In a letter on the Plum Organics website, founder Gigi Lee Chang explains that “after a routine test determined the formulation was incorrect. Plum Organics immediately investigated the matter and confirmed that a mixing error was to blame which resulted in an improper blend of carrots and apples.”