Are you trying to add sustainability to your everyday lifestyle? This Halloween you can give out healthy treats that not only taste good but healthy for the earth and the children. Here is a list of items that you can feel good about giving out to your trick-or-treat:
• Organic apple sauce snack packs
• Real-fruit strips and rolls from Stretch Island Fruit
• Boxes of organic raisins and other organic dried fruits.
• 100% honey sticks
• Raw or roasted nuts (ask parents before giving out nuts due to allergies)
• Organic Twisted Fruit
• Organic licorice bars, rope, and gum
Something else to think about is making treats for your trick-or-treat that they will enjoy. Here is a recipe for kid-friendly granola:
Ingredients
3 c old-fashioned oats
2 c rice cereal
1 c shredded coconut
1/4 c brown sugar
1/4 c maple syrup or honey, warmed slightly
1/4 vegetable oil
3/4 t salt
1/2 t cinnamon (optional)
1 c raisins (optional)
1/4 to 3/4 c chopped nuts (optional)
Directions
Preheat oven to 225 degrees.
Combine all ingredients except raisins in a very large bowl and mix until everything is well combined. You may need to slightly warm the syrup or honey if it is too sticky – it needs to be runny to coat everything.
Spread onto a cookie sheet and place in oven. Stir about every 10 to 15 minutes until everything is golden brown, usually about an hour. Keep an eye on it – don’t let it burn!
Remove from oven and add raisins or other dried fruit, if using. Let cool completely and store in airtight containers.
Courtesy of: Farm Bell Recipes submitted by Kelly in TX
After your granola is made it can be packaged individually in small brown paper or you can even make pouches out of wax paper my ironing the edges to create a sealed bag.
Here we go again – another outbreak of food contamination. This time the culprit is listeria, which begins with fever, aches, and digestive upsets, and can spread to the nervous system and become serious, even life-threatening. The media are naming cantaloupe as the vector this time – but keep in mind that according to the Mayo Clinic,
- “Raw vegetables that have been contaminated from the soil or from contaminated manure used as fertilizer
- Infected meat
- Unpasteurized milk or foods made with unpasteurized milk
- Certain processed foods — such as soft cheeses, hot dogs and deli meats that have been contaminated after processing.”
That means that in many cases of human infection with listeria, animal products are ultimately the source. Leafy greens are often blamed, when the cause may be the animal waste runoff from the ranch next door.
Anyway, journalist Mary Clare Jalonick, writing for the Associated Press, points out that there’s another cause: the long and winding road that takes any industrialized food product from the farm or ranch to your mouth. The establishments and processes of Middlemen, packagers, wholesalers all are potential sources of contamination. Jalonick quotes an FDA expert: “The food chain is very complex,” says Sherri McGarry, a senior adviser in the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Foods. “There are many steps, and the more steps there are the harder it can be to link up each step to identify what the common source.”
Fortunately, last year Congress passed a food safety law, giving the FDA more authority to trace food supplies. One way you can personally respond to this market complexity is to buy more locally grown foods. I know that local doesn’t solve all our food problems, but it addresses some of them, including this one.
Slow Food, as you probably know, is the international organization that opposes everything fast food represents. Consequently, Slow Food means healthy, organic, special food, lovingly prepared, served and eaten in a leisurely, civilized way.
And now Slow Food’s San Francisco branch has decided to tackle a big problem that fast food contributes to – childhood obesity. You’ve seen it in the news the last few years and you know that First Lady Michelle Obama is championing the campaign to eliminate its many causes. And there are many causes – I was an eating disorder specialist for 25 years and know from professional experience that the environment one lives in is part of the problem. You can see an article I co-authored on it here.
So let’s not blame the children, but help them. This conference 
features many experts on nutrition, health, and children. Apart from the main speakers, there will be breakout sessions on Policy, Medicine, Community Outreach/Food Justice, School Lunches, and Physical Activity. This conference will also have vendors representing local organizations, county agencies, and local health-based businesses.
Saturday, September 24, 10 am to 4.30 pm
Commonwealth Club, 595 Market St., 2nd floor
Admission $100, $80 student
A recent study by Interbrand (which helps companies create and exploit their brand, e.g., their image) assessed global corporations to see which ones were making their operations more environmentally responsible. The report is “Best Global Green Brands 2011.”
As an advocate of fresh, organic, and local, I am skeptical that huge food corporations may have justifiably made the list. But as an admitted list junkie, I checked it out to see if any were among the top 50. To my amazement, there were:
#27 Coca-Cola
#29 Pepsi
#35 Campbells
#36 Kellogg’s
#42 Starbucks, and hang onto your hats,
#45 McDonald’s.
Yes, I nearly fainted too. But read on.
The Interbrand report also lists how big a gap there is between what the company is doing, and what people perceive it as doing. Nor surprisingly, McDonald’s had the biggest gap, Coke is third, Kellogg’s fifth, and Starbucks eighth.
Should we believe this? The Interbrand report is interactive and gives much more information – check it out for yourself! And an informative writeup on all this can be found here
on Greenbiz, which is an excellent source for information on the good and bad eco-deeds of corporate America. Greenbiz also sends out regular newsletters (GreenBuzz), which you can sign up for on the website.
Joel Makower, who heads Green Biz, once wrote about what he called “Makower’s Paradox” – when companies are doing good environmental things WITHOUT talking about it. He suggested that perhaps they don’t want to go out on a limb and risk being called out for greenwashing. That makes a certain amount of sense…. if you’ve just started exercising and are still something of a couch potato, you wouldn’t advertise yourself as an athlete… yet.
So should we see this Interbrand list as good news? Or should we remain hugely skeptical? What do you think?
The Environmental Working Group has released a new report. Working with CleanMetrics, they assessed the rates of greenhouse gases emitted by 20 types of proteins (meat, fish, dairy, and vegetable sources). Here’s the take-home message : “Lamb, beef, pork and cheese generate the most greenhouse gases. They also tend to be high in fat and have the worst environmental impacts.”
I love it when experts not only give you the worrisome news, they show you practical steps you can take to respond. From EWG’s exhortation to “Eat ‘greener’ meat when you do eat it,” I’ve condensed some key recommendations:
For your health:
Avoid highly processed meats like lunchmeats, hot dogs, and smoked meats.
Choose leaner cuts, which may have fewer toxins than fatty ones
For the animals:
Choose certified humanely raised. You don’t want to participate in the torture perpetrated by factory farms! Niman Ranch, which began forty years ago north of San Francisco, has grown to partner with over 650 independent ranchers and states that all its animals are raised humanely.
For the environment:
Avoid farmed and airfreighted fish. Well, we in the Bay Area have access to local fish, so the air freight has less relevance here. But what about endangered species? What about. Monterey Bay Aquarium has a list here.
And of course, the most powerful recommendation of all is, “Eat less meat and dairy.”
This report and its website version are goldmines of information. For instance, you can find out which part of the life cycle of a given product made the heaviest environmental impact. Weird fact: “Roughly 20 percent of all meat sold in the U.S. winds up in the trash. That makes the pesticides, fertilizer, fuel and water used to produce and process it, as well as the resulting greenhouse gases and environmental damage, unnecessary and preventable.”
For the full report, go here.
We’ve all heard about extinctions and endangered species. These include not only pandas and Siberian tigers, but also many food species. An organization called RAFT (Restoring America’s Food Traditions) has catalogued over 1,100 American plant and animal species that are on the verge of extinction.
The opposite problem also exists – too many of a species, in the wrong place. “Wrong place” (as defined by humans) means a plant or animal has entered a region where it normally doesn’t live, and we call these “invasive.” Of course, natural environments have always changed over time, and what was invasive a thousand years ago is now native to a place. Our terms take the short-term view.
In any case, some of these newbies to a region can be really threatening (by eating or out-competing native life) or just seriously inconvenient, such as kudzu. The latest idea for solving two problems at once is: Eat the invaders! Elisabeth Rosenthal, one of my favorite New York Times writers, describes some of these initiatives. Lionfish and Asian carp are on the menu, and if you eat them instead of endangered or overfished species such as Chilean sea bass and grouper, you may be helping nature.
Environmentalists can see the plus side, including some of the folks at the Nature Conservancy (which works globally to preserve ecosystems and species) and Food and Water Watch (which reports on problems in industrial food and advocates for solutions)
There are downsides, though. What if fishers use unsustainable methods to catch these fish? What if they grew in waters that are contaminated? Such problems already exist with many species we already eat. 
