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Food Miles Are Not Black and White
Financial Times contributor Sarah Murray weighs in on the "food miles" diet. Murray, the author of Moveable Feasts: From Ancient Rome to the 21st Century, the Incredible Journeys of the Food We Eat, writes: The "food miles" diet is a neat concept. The trouble is, the distance food is transported is not necessarily an accurate measure of its environmental impact. Her analysis is noteworthy for its clearheadedness....Hunters Were the First Locavores
Image from iStockphoto.com A terrific, provocative op-ed piece in the New York Times today argues that hunters were locavores before anyone had coined the term. Writer Steven Rinella, author of The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine, is an avid hunter and, apparently, a serious environmentalist as well: While many people will never give up their opposition to killing Bambi, others may change their minds when they realize that destroying a deer's reproductive abilities or relying on the automobile for population control is really no less wasteful than tossing fresh produce into a landfill....Hunters need to push a new public image based on deeper traditions: we are stewards of the land, hunting on ground that we know and love, collecting...If It's Fresh and Local, Is It Always Greener?
Andrew Martin in his Feed column in the New York Times business section questions just how green the locavore movement is. What spurred his question? Researchers at UC Davis are conducting studies trying to determine the actual carbon footprint of local food. Isn't this kind of a silly academic exercise? We don't need a study to tell us that driving to a farmers' market every day in a gas-guzzling SUV to buy a pound of local produce leaves a heavy carbon footprint and is bad for the environment....The Takeout Conundrum
Photo from dslrninja on Flickr.com When I order takeout from my local Thai restaurant, the amount of nonrecyclable plastic that is used to carry all that delicious food to me is absolutely out of hand. There are the thick, round plastic containers (which are no doubt a huge improvement in quality over their aluminum predecessors) as well as plasticware I simply don't need, plastic soup and rice containers, and, of course, the plastic bag that the whole thing was delivered in. And then when I think about the fact that all this plastic gets used only once, the real guilt begins to set in....Five Easy Ways to Go Organic: Are They Right and Are There Others?
The New York Times had a blog post the other day that was brilliantly titled Five Easy Ways to Go Organic. Throw "easy" and "organic" into the same title and you're bound to elicit a response. If they had thrown "cheap" in there as well, they would have seen thousands of comments on the blog posts instead of hundreds. The gist of the post, which was mostly gleaned from an interview with Alan Greene, author of Raising Baby Green: Switching to organic is tough for many families who don’t want to pay higher prices or give up their favorite foods. But by choosing organic versions of just a few foods that you eat often, you can increase the percentage of...Which Diet Is Most Environmentally Friendly?
Slate magazine compares the environmental effects of vegetarianism and omnivorism. Eating some meat may make better use of environmental resources than eschewing meat all together, but overall people are eating more meat than what nature can efficiently supply....Save the Environment With PBJs
The PB&J Campaign aims to raise awareness about the positive environmental impact one could make by simply eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead of a meat-based alternative. For instance, you could save 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, 280 gallons of water, and 12 to 50 square feet of land by choosing a PBJ instead of a hamburger. If you're not a fan of peanut butter and jelly, there are plenty of other tasty environmentally friendly alternatives that can help slow global warming, reduce water waste, and save land....It's Easy Cookin' Green
A few weeks ago, the website Blackle.com crossed my path and I was instantly fascinated, but I'm going to spare you a click and give you the long and short of it: It's Google search, but it's not sponsored by Google, and its black. Fine, go. Click, I know you're going to, anyway. Despite being a black-clad, large sunglasses-sporting stereotypical New Yorker, it wasn't the site's chi-chi and fashionable affect that drew me in, but that it was built on the notion that the color black uses less energy on the web, and even eensy amounts of savings—especially when you consider the scale of a web behemoth such as Google—add up. Sadly, this premise that black uses less energy than...To Canvas Bag or Not to Canvas Bag
Washingtonians are no strangers to canvas bags. Plenty of lobbyists tote eco-chic "Save the Turtles" or "Barack the Vote" sacks on the Metro. But remembering to pack that extra one for the grocery run after work is a whole 'nother story. Annapolis, our Chesapeake Bay-side neighbors to the east, have spearheaded a plastic bag ban, following the lead of cities such as San Francisco, which enacted a ban in March, and Oakland in June. A similar switch in D.C. might take some time. "It's a huge lifestyle change, and a bunch of people just won't remember to bring their own," said Whole Foods Mid-Atlantic marketing director Sarah Kenney. Our minds still think in terms of paper-or-plastic, she said on...Hot Topics: Technique of the Week | The Food Lab
Today's Specials
8 Delicious Chocolate Cakes and Pies for Valentine's Day
Some might say that chocolate on Valentine's Day is about as unoriginal as you can get. We all remember the first heart-shaped box of overly sweet chocolate bonbons from grade school Valentines. But chocolate gift-giving needn't be a cliché. This year, let's bake our sweethearts chocolate cakes and pies instead! Here are 8 delicious recipes perfect for celebrating your love (of chocolate.)
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