Green Options

The San Francisco Ferry Market is a local favorite for unusual organic finds. My favorite recent find: pineapple guava (a.k.a. feijoa)! I found this refreshing salad fruit at the Mc Evoy Ranch stand.

Shown above is an organic cilantro salad with the feijoa and myer lemon. This delightful salad needs no pairing although the guava has a tart flavor that pairs well with mesculin greens.

Gathering together individual ingredients for a couple dollars at each vendor, has me spicing up dishes with organic produce.

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.”

It’s a popular myth that people who buy organic food only do so because they think it will make them healthier.

Really, folks?  Were we questioning the possibility that organically grown foods were more nutritious than traditional grown?  I think not.  We (being fully informed consumers) know that food is food is food.  Raw food is healthiest (as in lots and lots of produce in its natural state).  That’s a no brainer.  We also know that adding a dose of pesticide and herbicide to our produce is a BAD idea.  Sure, it doesn’t alter basic nutrition (same vitamins and minerals, fats and proteins), but it does introduce carcinogens into our bodies (not to mention a whole host of other unpleasantness).

According to CNN’s Jack Cafferty, “Researchers looked at 50,000 studies conducted over 50 years — and found no significant differences in the foods. They focused on a wide range of crops and livestock raised and marketed under organic standards.”

The cover of Michael Pollan’s terrific book ‘In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto’ offers the tag line “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” With the help of the country’s leading food expert I am going to elaborate on that–although if you choose to only read this far, that tag line (if acted upon) will benefit you greatly.

What to Eat
1. Eat a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, and legumes (organic and/or local is best).
2. Eat whole (not refined) foods.
3. Eat food (real food). Not too much (don’t overeat). Mostly plants (mostly plants).

What NOT to Eat
1. Don’t eat anything with more than 5 ingredients or with ingredients you can’t pronounce.
2. Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot (except honey).
3. Don’t eat meat–atleast, not too much (the environmental impact is alarming).

Most of us have heard about the slow food movement where we savor the taste of a place, know our farmers and sip the wine slowly, not gulp down a beer.

But what about Slow Money?

In Woody Tasch’s visionary book, Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Chelsea Green, 2008), he breaks from the grow-big-and-go-global-fast mode of industrial capitalism and industrial agriculture by providing a remarkable synthesis of the writings, ideas and practices from such authorities on the subject of soil, agriculture, community and commerce as Wendell Berry, Eliot Coleman, Gene Logsdon, Gary Snyder, E.F. Schumacher, Paul Hawken and David Suzuki – calling for and sharing examples of a new economy whereby capitalism creates and sustains life, not destroys it.

Tasch’s observation: “As it circulates the globe with ever accelerating speed, money is sucking the oxygen out of the air, the fertility out of the soil and the culture out of local communities.”

“In our devotion to money, market, and machine, we are destroying not only the fertility of the soil, but the fertility of our imaginations,” continues Tasch. “What is, in the farmer’s field, a struggle between economics and ecology becomes, in the investor’s mind, a struggle between quantity and quality, portfolios and possibilities, numbers and words.” Tasch goes on to document the widespread loss of topsoil and erosion of fertile land, noting that roughly a third of all farmland in the world has been degraded since World War II. “There is another kind of erosion at work here: erosion of social capital, erosion of community, erosion of an understanding of our place in the scheme of things.”

Expertly woven together like the rich tapestry of biological life abundant in a mere teaspoon of soil, Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money tugs at our yearning to be connected to the land, to the soil and to the great food it can provide. It also explores our relationship to money and all the things it can, and cannot, buy.

What do you do if you find yourself in the middle of an urban healthy-food desert? Look for an oasis for sustenance. Oakland may be on the list of the top 10 Greenest Cities, but certain areas like West Oakland are nearly bereft of healthy, local food, which is an important element of sustainability. Fortunately, an oasis has just appeared in West Oakland in the form of a worker-owned grocery store with a focus on healthy, organic, local food and community.

Mandela Foods Cooperative finally opened its doors a few weeks ago and I was there to help celebrate. A project that has been many years in the making, Mandela made locals headlines this spring in anticipation of its opening because of its importance in the community.

As my wife and I write about in ECOpreneuring, if good health is important – and it should be for everyone – then a regular exercise routine along with eating right becomes a feature in our sustainable lifestyle, whether you walk around the block, do yoga or work out three times a week at a local YMCA like we do.  Or go for a hike in the woods instead of watching more TV.

Remember the last time you had the flu or a lingering cold? Get much done? When we’re healthy, we take our good health for granted. Despite what our politicians and healthcare providers might suggest, good healthcare does not necessarily provide good health. Our lifestyle and daily habits contribute to feeling great just about every day of the year.

Some companies provide a good healthcare plan when it comes to physician access and medical coverage. But what does that matter when the stress-filled, unhealthy environment in a cubicle – with no access to the outdoors and fresh air – ends up giving us poor health? The American healthcare system is great – perhaps the best in the world – if we crashed in our car. It’s designed for treatment, not prevention. It’s a healthcare system based on the poor health of relatively well-off people who can pay (by credit or otherwise) for the services it provides.

Given all the debate on a national healthcare plan offered by the United States, below are a few promising trends many people are discovering.

Organic popsicles…yes, I said it…that are bright colors, easy to make and full of ooey, gooey yumminess!

Ready for the super specific recipe? Here goes!

Editor’s note: This post is a contribution by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. See his last post on electric vehicle charging infrastructure or all of his previous posts here. A companion piece was also posted on RedGreenandBlue.org earlier today.

San Francisco is a city that knows how to recycle. We work hard to give new life to our paper, bottles, cans and other waste.

New statistics released today show we are keeping 72 percent of all discards from going to the landfill – up from 70 percent the year before.

That’s a big leap for one year. The most significant gains came from the recycling of material from building sites – due in large part to our 2006 mandatory Construction and Demolition Debris Recovery Ordinance.

By requiring builders to recycle debris from construction projects, we were able to divert tens of thousands of new tons of material away from the landfill. This ordinance is unique in that it doesn’t require deposits or bonds, making it small business-friendly and limiting the amount of bureaucracy needed to implement the program.

When it comes to our recycling programs, we’re always in the development phase. In order to meet our ambitious goal of 75 percent recycling by 2010 and zero waste by 2020, we are constantly looking for additional materials to recycle, and for emerging markets to make use of our recyclables.

• » See Also: Consumer solar energy aggregation project launched in San Diego
• » Get CleanTechnica by RSS or sign up by email.

I’m a sucker for anything organic. Even those organic, crunchy snacks that remind me of cheese doodles. Part of me feels justified in eating these, because they are organic, of course, how can they be bad?

When I am thinking clearly, not in the grocery store at 5pm with two hungry kids, I see plainly that junk food is junk food. The New York times ran an interesting story that too many Americans are seeing organic food as the solution and are not looking at the big picture. We want buying organic to be the answer. We want it to help us eat healthier. We want it to solve the obesity problem. Eating organic food is in most cases better for the earth and for us, but the truth that the article states is: