Entries tagged with 'Serious Green'
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[Flickr: ExperienceLA] Thanksgiving is coming up quick and it's time to start thinking about all the fixins' and the main event—the turkey. This year, think about committing to a Heritage turkey instead of your normal supermarket pick. A Normal Bird [Flickr: Martin Pettitt] So what's wrong with most of those birds you'll find in the supermarket? Your normal bird (almost all turkeys bred for Thanksgiving are the Broad-Breasted White or Broad-Breasted Bronze variety) are so removed from a traditional turkey that they must be artificially inseminated to reproduce. These birds, all come from one basic genetic line that was developed in the 1950's. In keeping with Americans' preference for white meat, these birds were bred to have extremely large...
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Michael Pollan's been making some pretty big waves lately--in the media, at colleges, with farmers and with little tots. Time to check in on what he's been up to and what it all says about the state of green food today.
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Got a lot of land? Need to clean it of brush quickly? Forget the gas-guzzling bush hog or poisonous herbicides. Time for some eco-friendly vegetation management. Goats to the rescue!
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Coffee seedlings under a canopy of old leaves. [Flickr: jakeliefer] With October here (and winter peeking around the corner) the harvest at local farmers' markets is leveling off. In many areas, summer CSAs are dropping off their final shares of the season. While the change in weather is making it harder to buy food from local and sustainable sources, it leaves us a perfect opportunity to celebrate Fair Trade Month....
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[Photograph: Lisa Moussalli] This is my theory. You and all your foodie friends, the New York Times' Dining section, and the Washington Post's Home and Garden section can all call something a new food trend. Slate can even call it a bogus trend. But it's when a food trend lands on the front page of the business section that it's really gone mainstream. The chickens have landed in our backyards and they're here to stay. Everyone's got a reason for you to rush out to get some of these feathered friends for your own backyard: fresher free-range eggs, being closer to the source of your food, a sense of self-reliance, and free nitrogen-rich fertilizer. These are all legitimate answers,...
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[Photograph: theogeo on Flickr] Things are about to get competitive in the kitchen and it's not a Top Chef Quickfire challenge. It's time to start hypercooking. Hypercooking is defined by The Food Section as "an environmentally conscious way of cooking that seeks to maximize the impact of the energy used during the cooking process." Hypercooking is the kitchen version of hypermiling, in which drivers change they way they drive and use specific techniques to go as far as possible on a gallon of gas. In the Big Green Cookbook Jackie Newgent offers hypercooking tips and recipes, such as one for cookies that finish baking in the residual heat of the oven. Try these tips, after the jump, to save...
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"A CSK doesn't just deliver local, sustainable product, it provides you with a ready-to-eat meal." [Flickr: Neighborhood Notes] You try your best to be green, buying local when you can, recycling, conserving water, the list goes on. But when it comes to participating in a Community Supported Agriculture (or CSA) share, you stop short. Unknown quantities of a random assortment of vegetables piling up on you week after week? Eeek. If this sounds like you, or maybe you don't like too cook or find it too time-consuming or too isolating, Community Supported Kitchens to the rescue! A Community Supported Kitchen (CSK) is a new idea to connect farmers and eaters, especially those eaters who wand to eat locally, but currently...
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[iStockphoto: thebroker] In Serious Green, we recently told you about some food and environmental films that go beyond the popular Food Inc. Thanks to everyone for chiming in with even more suggestions. Here are a few more good ones: Food Fight (not to be confused with this Food Fight) is a look at the development of American agriculture and policy in the 20th century and the birth of the counter-revolution of the local and organic foods movement. Food Stamped follows a nutrition educator and her husband as they do their best to eat healthy food on a weekly $50 food stamp budget. What's On Your Plate? is a documentary that follows two 11-year-old New Yorkers, Sadie and Safiyah, as...
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"Freezing is easier than traditional canning, but don't just start chucking plums into the freezer with reckless abandon." [Photograph: Cornell University Library] Summer is on its way out the door and it's taking delicious fruits and vegetables with it. Now's the time to preserve the bounty from your garden or local farmers' market, to keep you eating local during the tomato-less and berry-less days ahead. Over the past couple of years, I've fallen head-over-heels in love with canning. I've canned blackberry-ginger jam and sweet pickles, spicy tomato sauce and sour cherry preserves. I've got a shelf full of canning books, both new and old. I've taught others to can, and I even wrote a 50-page senior essay on the history...
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[Photograph ©iStockphoto.com/apomares] School lunch in the district where I attended K-12 was, frankly, disgusting. I was lucky enough to come from a home where there was enough money and time for me to have a home-packed lunch every day. There were plenty of kids who loved the square sausage pizza and hermetically sealed PBJs, but I'm sure there were also plenty who would have gladly eaten something else had they not been on the free-lunch program. Now, it's pretty clear that no matter if my classmates liked it or not, they shouldn't have been eating the food the school was dishing up. Schools send a message to children with the foods that are served. The additives, preservatives, and sugar...
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