Green Options

Apples are not only delicious and an easy snack, but also very healthy in numerous ways. What are the main benefits of eating apples? What are some great apple recipes?

Apples are a great source of dietary fiber. As a result, they are believed to reduce the risk of some cancers, they improve the functioning of the intestines, eliminate cholesterol from the digestive tract, cleanse the lungs and colon, and help to prevent and potentially cure appendicitis.

Apples are linked to a reduced risk of prostate cancer, stroke, asthma and Type 2 diabetes. Moreover, as Healing with Whole Foods reports, due to all the pectin apples contain, they can help to reduce blood cholesterol and remove toxic metals from the body such as lead and mercury. In addition, apples are also found to play a very beneficial role in cleansing the liver.

I love to eat apples with peanut butter. It’s one of my favorite breakfast combinations. But here are a couple of interesting apple recipes that go beyond my apple and peanut butter dish. Enjoy a rice casserole with apples or apple noodle pasta for lunch or dinner sometime!

There’s so much more to the wonderful world of noodles than old-world durum semolina pasta. And no, I’m not talking about substituting stringy spaghetti squash or strips of summer squash for pastalicious goodness.  Did you know there are gluten-free noodles made from rice, soy protein, quinoa, and even sweet potato starch?

Traditional farmers in the Thai hills are still growing rice the old fashioned way, and they may be single-handedly preserving the crop’s genetic diversity in the process.

Domesticated rice varieties have been selected for their high yield, and though they are necessary in order to feed the world’s growing population, they are genetically static. But a new study demonstrates that the traditional farming methods still practiced in remote areas of Thailand are preserving ancestral varieties of rice by keeping them genetically dynamic.

Have seasonal allergies? Just warm up some genetically modified rice for relief!

Researchers at Japan’s National Institute for Agrobiological Sciences in Tsukubahope that you think this solution sounds simply delicious. They’ve developed a rice that could help alleviate the itchiness and watery eyes associated with hayfever. And after safety tests on macaques (monkeys), researchers are excited to take the next step: humans trials.

I’d like to try this GM rice in people in the near future.

Researchers point out that the 26-week long trial on the monkeys was for safety, not efficacy. So how would this mutant rice work?

by Lester R. Brown

In April 2005, the World Food Programme and the Chinese government jointly announced that food aid shipments to China would stop at the end of the year. For a country where a generation ago hundreds of millions of people were chronically hungry, this was a landmark achievement. Not only has China ended its dependence on food aid, but almost overnight it has become the world’s third largest food aid donor.

As noted in Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, the key to China’s success was the economic reforms in 1978 that dismantled its system of agricultural collectives, known as production teams, and replaced them with family farms. In each village, the land was allocated among families, giving them long-term leases on their piece of land. The move harnessed the energy and ingenuity of China’s rural population, raising the grain harvest by half from 1977 to 1986. With its fast-expanding economy raising incomes, with population growth slowing, and with the grain harvest climbing, China eradicated most of its hunger in less than a decade—in fact, it eradicated more hunger in a shorter period of time than any country in history.

While hunger has been disappearing in China, it has been spreading throughout much of the developing world, notably sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Indian subcontinent. As a result, the number of people in developing countries who are hungry has increased from a recent historical low of 800 million in 1996 to over 1 billion today. Part of this recent rise can be attributed to higher food prices and the global economic crisis. In the absence of strong leadership, the number of hungry people in the world will rise even further, with children suffering the most.

There’s an organic garden on Barack Obama’s lawn. The First Family eats local, organic, and seasonal food.

So why did the President’s scientific advisory team for last fall’s election include Sharon Long, a former member of Monsanto’s board of directors?

And why did Obama recently appoint Barbara Schaal, a plant geneticist with connections to Monsanto, to his Science and Technology Advisory Council?

The chemical giant Bayer — the same Bayer which brought you aspirin, heroin and mustard gas, and currently manufactures a wide variety of pesticides, herbicides, polyurethanes and other questionable chemicals — has wrapped their toxic fingers around our rice.

This is nothing new. The company’s glufosinate-resistant LL62 genetically modified rice isn’t commercially grown, but that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t already entered the global food supply.

Slash-and-burn agriculture may be bad for the environment, but in southeast Asia, the cure may be worse than the disease. Endorsed by multiple governments, at both the local and national levels, as well as numerous business interests, everyone from individual farmers to massive corporations has been replacing the traditional slash-and-burn, more technically known as swidden, method of farming with rubber plantations managed with European techniques. In the last 20 years, over 1.2 million acres of land in China, Thailand, Vietnam, [...]

Over the course of a lifetime, the average American consumes over 87,000 slices of bread.  Yes, you read that correctly — eighty seven thousand. That’s more than a loaf per week per person, not counting the additional 5,000 hot dog buns and 12,000 hamburger buns each American devours in his or her life.

All that wheat calculates out to a lifetime grand total of 21,947 loaves and buns.  The National Geographic Society’s Human Footprint project has illustrated this shocking bread obsession in a stunning visual (see the video clip below).   In the words of my little brother, who is no stranger to wheatless ways,  “That is a totally nasty amount of bread.”

There’s no argument that bread is an American staple.  Amber waves of grain are, after all, an American icon.  But we can’t live by bread alone.  So what are some wheatless alternatives?

Most of us have a love/hate relationship with dill.  If you grew up on Scandinavian-inspired dishes, as I did, you no doubt have a fond appreciation for its distinctive flavors — I loved to feel dill’s feathery-soft leaves against my hand when exploring in my mom’s garden as a girl.  On the other hand, if your only association with dill is soggy, sickly-green supermarket pickles, then you might not be quite so keen on the herb.

Often overlooked, dill — from the Norse dilla, meaning, “to soothe” — possesses surprising characteristics.  Among its little-known superpowers are antibacterial and calming properties; the annual herb can be made into a stomach-soothing tea. Dill has been popular since Biblical times, and is even mentioned as a valuable commodity in the Gospels: “You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness.”

Traditionally used in food to season fish or as a balance to yogurt’s tanginess, dill can also be used to brighten this protein-rich, vegan-friendly, summery rice salad.

Editor’s Note: This is a contribution from one our content partners, Divine Caroline.

By Allison Fishman of MainStreet for DivineCaroline.com

One of my favorite dinners as a kid was “leftover night,” when my parents would resurrect the greatest hits from the previous week.

Only now do I realize they were not only serving me delicious encores, they were also saving money on grocery bills.

By high school I was a leftover epicure. I knew which leftover dishes were better cold (lo mein and pizza), which improved when microwaved (stews and chili’s), and how to morph certain leftovers into a totally different dish, even better than the first.

Here are six of my favorite recyclable meals: