Green Options

While Brisbane’s waste removal system battles to discard perfectly good mangos, this contrasts starkly with the difficulties and opportunities associated with agricultural produce gluts in poor communities in rural Africa.

Brisbane Mangoes

So good is the mango harvest this year, that residents of Brisbane’s suburbs are battling to get rid of their excess mangos.

Apparently some trees are dropping up to 60 mangoes overnight. If these are simply placed in rubbish bins they are too heavy for the mechanical garbage trucks and get left on the street. Normally there would be a $24 fee to get a garbage truck to come back and empty the bin, but the City Council has agreed to waive this cost so long as residents first remove the mangoes. The Council has also removed the charge for dumping mangoes at the city’s transfer stations.

So in Australia the fuss is about getting the mangoes to the dump and not about the waste of food or the loss of income opportunities, that bother the African.

Are you looking to feel balanced inside? Perhaps you’ve tried eating alkaline and are looking for a new recipe.

Try this simple sprout recipe you can grow yourself! Try these Organic Sprouted Seed Kits.

Sprouts are one of the most natural and healthy foods for the body. Nourish yourself, and feel the difference. Most supplements for digestion, alkalinity, immunity, energy, and extra greens, include sprouts of some sort. Almost anything that is a seed may be sprouted. Beans are sprout-able too!

Keep reading for this easy recipe that may serve as a side dish, a larger salad or taco topping, or a mid day snack.

Going to a body and nutrition expert with my husband is one of the best things we’ve done for ourselves. What was the key take away? Warning! Turn Alkaline!

Turn Alkaline? Are we magicians? Well according to biochemists we are! You can change your body chemistry with what you eat!

Chemicals have seeped into foods, air, and water, which in turn lower our system’s ability to control the chemistry of our body fluids, increasing illness and chronic disease.

The sad fact is that most food consumption in the wealthiest nations has shifted from nutritious raw foods to low nutritional value processed foods and we need to shift it back. Now that our total biological terrain is at risk, we urgently need to do some clean up by shifting our body chemistry back to the raw, organic foods it was designed to function on as we’ve evolved.

Below I’ve listed out a quick list of the good foods (alkaline) to treat your body to often…

We all know we’re supposed to get a few good servings of fruits and vegetables in our daily diets. Here are a few fun ones in the vegetable category. Hope you enjoy these eclectic stuffed vegetable dishes.

Think back to the last direct-marketed product you saw on television. You probably remember the hyped-up pitch person, the “special offer” for buying now, the price that ends .95.  You may also remember thinking “Why would anyone want that?”

Yes… most of the products marketed on television border on useless crap.  They’re symbols of conspicuous consumption.  The sales pitch feels cheesy. And, yet, as I mentioned in Five Greenish Products You’ve Seen on TV, a small handful of them appeal to values we promote here at sustainablog: conservation, re-use, and efficiency.

I’ve come across a few more that strike me not only as appealing to these values (and perhaps a few others that are positive), but also as a great way to spread sustainable practices… even if they’re not necessarily labeled that way.  Again, I don’t know the lifecycles of these products.  I assume most of them are made in China. I wouldn’t call any of them “green,” or endorse them outright (or try to sell them through affiliate links here).  But they’re definitely “greenish”… and if direct marketers are selling products by appealing to some of the values mentioned above, that’s an ever-so-small step forward. Here we go…

Ten credible on line calculators gave Carbon Footprints that ranged from 27 000 to 76 000 pounds of carbon emitted a year for the same input data. An understanding of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with what we do and consume will give us a better chance of reducing our emissions than using such inaccurate calculators. 

What’s the problem?

J. Paul Padgett and collegues at Vanderbilt University and the University of Washington analysed the results obtained using 10 carbon footprint calculators from credible organisations including; American Forests, Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF), CarbonCounter,The Conservation Fund and the Environmental Impact Agency (EPA). Their results are published in the Environmental Impact Assessment Review 28 (2008). They identified the massive range refered to above, that ammounts to a difference of  180% between the lowest and highest figures and concluded that “Given their prevalence and potential influence, CO2 calculators can provide even greater public benefit by providing greater consistency and clarity.

Here are a few known healing properties of common foods you may be tempted to enjoy at fall festivities:

Cranberries: As you may already know, cranberries are body purifiers, low in calories, have no fat and are a nice source of Vitamin C. This health blog states:

“some of the health benefits of eating cranberries:

* prevent bacteria in the bladder, kidneys and prostate
* supports optimum urinary tract health
* may prevent kidney stones
* have both antiviral and antibacterial properties

Here are some fun facts about cranberries:

* More than 85% of the weight of cranberries is water!
* Native Americans used a brewed a cranberry mixture to draw poison from arrow wounds..”

Tomatoes: Pureed, cooked, stewed, in sauce, stored as a sundried treat or marinade, lycophene rich tomatoes are super healing for the body.

After reading Robin’s post last week on easy weeknight meals, I was craving that comfort food classic, tomato soup and grilled cheese.  I’ve been eating it in various incantations since I was tiny, and I wanted a refined, yet simple version of soup.  I looked through several cookbooks for a filling soup that only required ingredients I had on hand, and when I saw Deborah Madison’s Summer Tomato Soup, I knew I would try something similar.  I literally made and enjoyed this dish today and wanted to pass it along.

Got tomatoes? Looking for a simple, delicious way to use those?  Because we planted somewhat late, we’re at the peak of our tomato harvest, and last night I made my first pasta sauce from scratch from slow-roasted plum tomatoes fresh from the garden. Slow-roasting concentrates the sweet flavor of the tomatoes, transforming them into an entirely different entity.  Find out how, after the jump…

Whole Foods, following in the footsteps of Taco Bell, Burger King, and McDonalds, agreed this week to become the first grocery chain to improve working conditions and pay for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), tomato workers from Florida.  Whole Foods will pay an extra penny per pound of tomatoes, and will work in conjunction with the CIW to establish modern working standards for its agricultural workers.

If you were one of my Facebook friends, you would be able to see that right now “Robin is channeling Carl Spackler. Where’s the dynomite!”

You remember Carl Spackler, don’t you? The Bill Murray character from Caddyshack. The guy whose only goal in life was to get the gopher. No matter what he tried, he couldn’t. Because he knew. He knew that “a varmit will never quite - ever. They’re like the Viet Cong - Varmint Cong.”

Okay, let’s back up. Late last year, I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Up until then, I had been focusing a lot on energy conservation and recycling. But Kingsolver’s book opened my eyes to the importance that food plays in sustainability. I got excited and couldn’t wait for the spring so I could plant an organic garden.

In April, my kindergartener and I planted seeds in yogurt cups and nurtured them while they grew on the window sill. In May, my husband (with a broken arm) tilled a plot in the back yard. My family loaded up garbage cans full of compost from a local department of public works and dumped it into the garden. I bought organic plant food from the farmer’s market. We planted four kinds of tomatoes, carrots, peppers, eggplant, green beans, and a variety of herbs. Then we waited, lovingly weeding and watering and watching.

Then came the varmints. First they got the carrots. I didn’t freak. I knew carrots were a risk with all the rabbits we have in the backyard. Then they got my cilantro. Next went the green beans and every single flower on the eggplants. I tried various natural critter control. None of it worked. I even planted marigolds that are supposed to repel the bunnies. The bunnies ate them. They invited their friends the squirrels and chipmunks to the party, too.