50 Ways to reduce your carbon footprint
"Just hop on the (biodiesel) bus, Gus. Make a new (home energy) plan, Stan..."
We know from singer songwriter, Paul Simon, that there are 50 ways to leave your lover, but did you know that there also 50 ways to leave your carbon-wasting ways? The Metro Silicon Valley News has recently published a helpful list of 50 things we can do to reduce our carbon footprint. Remarkably, 10 out of the 50 had a connection to food, drink and gardening. Maybe it's time we all found a new plan.
26. READ LABELS AND BUY LOCAL. Organic from Canada or overseas isn't as easy on the environment as locally produced products. Buying anything imported across an ocean means a container ship transported it. "Just one container ship traveling one mile produces NOx emissions equaling 25,000 cars traveling the same distance," says Anthony Fournier of the Santa Barbara County Pollution Control District. Foreign manufacturers often use carbon-intensive industrial and environmental practices that are illegal here. Many imports are made in sweatshops where people labor in dangerous work environments and aren't paid fairly. Reducing the demand for imports not only reduces our carbon footprint but also sends a message to big business that we want better for everyone.
34. BECOME A LOCAVORE. When you choose out of season organic food that's from journeyed overseas instead of locally grown anything, the pollution caused by the container ships outweighs any benefit you're going to get. Locavores say eating what's available locally is healthier anyway. Cooking dinner? Make a few meals at the same time and stash them in the fridge.
35. SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL FARMER. Visit www.localharvest .org and find the farmers market nearest you. Even better, find a CSA and get your produce from a sustainable local family farm.
36. MAKE YOUR OWN SALAD. Live Earth Farm's Debbie Palmer says make your own organic salad mixes from scratch and use less bagged and precut produce because they use a lot of resources to produce.
37. DON'T BE A SLAVE TO CONVENIENCE. We'll all be paying later for using convenience foods like packaged mixed salads, because they use a lot of resources to produce.
38. AVOID FAST FOOD. Methane-producing factory farming and long-distance shipping are the heart of its business model and they're clear-cutting rain forests to graze their cows.
39. EAT LESS MEAT. Especially beef. The Worldwatch Institute says growing numbers of intensively farmed livestock are responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and account for 37 percent of emissions of methane, which has more than 20 times the global warming potential of CO2, and 65 percent of emissions of nitrous oxide, another powerful greenhouse gas, coming from manure.
41. GREEN COFFEE IS DELICIOUS. Barefoot Coffee Roasters' Andy Newbom says that when you buy fair trade or organic coffee you're supporting sustainable farming practices that don't clear-cut trees or use pesticides or chemical fertilizers and that makes a big difference. "Buying fair trade coffee rewards and supports sustainable farming, reducing developing nations' carbon footprint," he says. "It's easy for the first world to say let's reduce our carbon footprint, but it's harder for farmers in developing countries to do this." Buy fair trade beans whole or ground, get a press or cloth filter and make your own.
42. DISPOSABLE CUPS? Really? Do the math: Buying coffee every day in a disposable cup generates at least 20 pounds of paper a year plus several hundred megaindustrially produced plastic covers. Styrofoam cups are worse. Dr. Theo Colborn, in "Our Stolen Future," says researchers have found traces of polystyrene in 100 percent of human tissue tested, because it migrates from the cup into hot food and beverages. Yuk! Bring your own coffee cup!
47. YOUR GARDEN ISN'T AS GREEN AS YOU THINK. Alrie Middlebrook designs and builds native plant gardens locally. She says take out your water-guzzling lawn and replace it with native plants. They use less water and nourish birds and bees.
Photocredit: Andy
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Other News in the From the Garden category |
| 2. |
September 2007 Newsletter
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To read the full newsletter, please see: http://www.kitchengardeners.org/newsletterseptember07.html
Dear Kitchen Gardener,
I hope you're either enjoying or planning bumper harvests. We
harvested a great crop of participation and awareness raising at this
year's Kitchen Garden Day celebration and have put together
a short video to share some of what happened that day.
While it'd be nice to bask in
the warm glow of those harvests, October is too busy a gardening month
to kick back. In Maine, there's
pesto and
sauerkraut to be made, squash to be cured, apples to be picked, and
tomatoes to be canned or frozen. October also offers some of the
crispest, best-tasting salads of the year just ready to be
cut, rinsed, and
spun. Garlic traditionally goes in the ground on or around
Columbus Day, but that day seems to be slipping back a week or two in
our brave new, globally-warmed world.
October's also a month for
adding new life to tired beds through the addition of compost. For
those of you who don't have a heaping pile of chocolate cake-like
compost to dig into, autumn's a great time, the best time in fact, to
start a new pile using all those vines and stems that have stopped
delivering, fallen leaves, and the lush, nitrogen-rich grass clippings
that suburban lawns so effortlessly produce in the fall.
The fall is also the best
time for planning and starting new garden projects. Last week, I
paid a visit to the French School of Maine to help them identify a site
for a new "potager". Monsieur le Directeur and a
group of professeurs directed me to a rolling,
field available for the school's use just a three minute's walk from the
school. I felt a bit envious glancing over the grassy expanse,
doing quick math in my head at all the food that such a large plot could
generate. While the field was gorgeous and had very tall weeds
(usually a reliable sign of soil fertility), I urged them to scope out a
spot closer to the school. What holds for home gardens holds for
school gardens too: the closer to the kitchen, the better.
We ultimately chose to site
the new garden in a high profile and high traffic spot right in front of
the school. Not only is it the best spot in terms of sunlight and
promixity, but it sends a strong message that health and good food are
high on the school's agenda. Once they've got their potager
dug and their systems in place, they can consider turning the larger
piece of land into a true farm capable of supplying their cafeteria.
This experience and some
others I've been a part of recently have got me thinking about where our
schools' priorities are now and perhaps ought to be. A few years
back, Maine boasted being the first state to prepare its children for
the "information age" by
providing every 7th
and 8th grade student and teacher with a laptop computer.
Several years into the program, it's amazing to see how comfortable and
skilled Maine's young people have become with this important tool.
This, of course, got me
pondering new "firsts" for Maine and other forward-looking states or
regions, in the US or abroad. Which state or region will be the
first to prepare its students for the coming "ecology age" by mandating
that every primary or intermediate school in its area have an organic
kitchen garden and age-appropriate garden curriculum? Surely,
there is no better way to teach health and healthy eating than to engage
young people in the process of heathy food production.
As with the laptop initative,
such an idea would surely encounter resistance, but what revolutionary
idea hasn't?
Wishing you a delicious
October,
PS: It's still not too late
to win your chance at over $1000 in prizes through our
Grow-Off Show-Off Contest, but the clock is ticking. As an
added bonus, the first 50 entries automatically win a free subscription
to Mother Earth News. Deadline for entries is November 1st.
Note sure what you can enter, then see
here.
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| 3. |
Building tomato cages
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By Roger Postley
First of all -- lets get this straight!!! There is absolutely only one correct way to raise tomatoes! (And that is whatever method works for you.) I have used stakes, trellises, store-bought cages, 'post and weave', and homemade cages. The latter has worked best for me and allows me the greatest production in the smallest area. The disadvantage is cost, construction time, and required storage space.
I like tomato cages! Concrete remesh can be found at most major consumer lumberyards. It comes in 50’ and 150' rolls. The wire is very strong and can be difficult to handle. Three essential tools are a small pair of bolt cutters, a large pair of slip-joint pliers, and a screwdriver type nut-driver with an interior hollow shaft diameter just slightly larger than the diameter of the remesh wire. There is variation in the rigidity of remesh – choose accordingly; stiffer wire is stronger but harder to bend.
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| 4. |
The Real Science of Organic Farming
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Traditional Farming’s reliance on
pesticide is a deadly choice for consumers. Scientists say, first and foremost,
to seek out organic foods, fruits...
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| 5. |
Water: Tap is the new Bottled
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Just as in the world of high fashion, trends come and go in the world of food and drink. It was once seen as the height of food fashion to buy "designer water". It was what the rich and famous did and, therefore the logic goes, what the rest of us should aspire to do. Now, however, tap water is enjoying a renaissance in popularity.
Some of the most chic restaurants in the US - such as Chez Panisse in the Bay Area and Del Posto in New York - now serve only their own filtered still and sparkling tap water. This gushing new popularity comes amidst admissions on the part of many bottled water makers like Pepsi (maker of Aquafina) that their waters do not originate from some pristine mountain spring, but from a public tap as well. Below you'll find The New York Times' take on the issue which, to us, reads like a drink of cool water on a hot, summer day. Tap water, that is.
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Other News |
Fayetteville Chef Helping Plan New Restaurant
Juan Barcenas, best known for his work as the chef at Bordino’s and the owner of Picasso’s Pizza, is helping the group who recently bought the former Sassafras restaurant on College Avenue.
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New Year's Eve Recipes
Some New Year's Eve favorite foods are traditional and some are trendy. Whether you are planning a full meal or party finger foods, here are the most popular recipes for...
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Everyday Menus: No Cook Recipes
