From Marketplace:
The burger chain says it will start buying 2% of its eggs and 10% of its pork from suppliers who don’t cage the animals. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a significant philosophical change — and BK says it’ll use more as supply becomes available.
Of course, that doesn’t mean their food will be any better for you, but at least it will be a little better for the world.
The Mister Waters our Lettuce Crop
The Lettuce Crop (box one of two)
Seeds!
What an amazing day yesterday! Have I mentioned how much I love Colorado? After rain all day Saturday, yesterday was bright and shiny and clean and deliciously warm.
The husband and I spent the whole morning poking around local nurseries. We have exciting plans for a container vegetable garden out on our patio. We were hoping to buy seedlings, but realized that it’s still pretty early for vegetables here; one lady told us that the last freeze isn’t predicted until Mother’s Day weekend. Yikes! But she did give us some good ideas for crops we could start now, like lettuce, spinach, broccoli, and kale.
We had to stop for lunch, having become overwhelmed with our options, and once we had some food in us, we decided on a plan of action. We purchased two beautiful wooden window box-style planters on sale, some lettuce seedlings, a raspberry bush, a bunch of seeds, and those cute little pop up soil thingies for starting seeds. Oh, and some soil.
Our plan is to start a bunch of seeds indoors and wait out the 4-8 weeks for them to mature and for the weather to warm up some more. By then, we should be able to transplant them outside easily, and we should also be enjoying our first lettuce crop!
I can’t even tell you how excited I am to try my hand at vegetable gardening, even if it is only in pots on our patio. The last time I grew vegetables, I was probably about eight years old, and my parents did most of the work! But I still remember the pleasure of eating fresh peas and carrots straight from our back yard.
There’s something so satisfying about growing things. Gardens have a lot to teach us, like patience and responsibility. Nothing happens on an artificial time table with a garden; things grow in their own way, in their own time, and they depend on you for food and water and care.
We plan to grow lettuce (as I mentioned), spinach, eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, green onions, basil, oregano, thyme, cilantro, nasturtiums, zinnias, and sweet peas.
And then, today, You Grow Girl posted a review of seed-starting techniques! Must be that time of year.
First, let me point you over to Delight.com –– kind of like woot, this site offers a deal of the day, but the stuff on the offing is much prettier and seriously luxe. (I’m actually REALLY tempted by this bath caddy; I love my baths, but can I really justify $35 for a bath caddy? On the other hand, I do a lot of my best thinking in the bath… Decisions, decisions.)
Second, delight.com has a sister site, DelightfulBlogs.com, which rates, reviews, and recommends “blogs of interest to creative Generation X and Baby Boomer women.” (I missed gen X by a few years, but I don’t think they’ve come up with a cute name for my generation, so I’ll take it.)
Following this winding path of my stream of consciousness, the new blog of which I speak, The Organic Beauty Expert, popped up as one of the featured blogs at delightfulblogs.com, and of course I was intrigued. I don’t know much of anything about organic beauty products (or why I should choose them over traditional beauty products other than, you know, the toxic chemicals which I now assume to be in just about everything), but I reckon this site might teach me a few things.
I was especially interested in this post on some wallet-friendly alternatives to Origins’ Plantidote products. I recently bought some of the Plantidote Serum thanks to a generous subsidy by my organic enabler, but I simply don’t have the Benjamins to shell out for the whole line of products.
So check it out! I’ve added The Organic Beauty Expert to the blogroll for your convenience.
I already mentioned the fact that Wal-Mart “organic” milk is getting a lot of suspicious looks from consumers, but The Good Human has articles that expand the issue to include all the other chain store brand milk that comes from Aurora dairy.
Personally, I think it’s a serious breach of trust when manufacturers do this to their consumers. While they are, perhaps, following the letter of the law when it comes to standards for organic products, there is a bigger, more important, and unfortunately unwritten set of standards that people who believe in organics want, and it’s disappointing to realize that while we thought organics were going mainstream –– we were right. In the worst way possible.
Two steps forward, as they say…
The 100-Mile Diet is simple. It’s a living experiment in local eating that will reconnect you with your food, your local farmers, the seasons, and the landscape you live in.
After all the great talk yesterday about the benefits of local versus just organic, I thought today would be a good time to post some of the resources I’ve been collecting on eating locally.
Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon decided to try an experiment: they would eat nothing that was not grown within a 100 mile radius of their home in Vancouver. For a whole year.
From those humble beginnings, a grass roots movement has sprung. The creators have written a book and started a very cool website that looks to have lots of nice features once completed including a section on local resources.
While a strict 100 mile diet might not be for everyone (Do they grow sugar cane in your neck of the woods? Coffee? Chocolate?), the idea is sound, and the 100 Mile Diet website lists 13 reasons to eat locally––my favorite being, “A friend of ours has a theory that a night spent making jam–or in his case, perogies–with friends will always be better a time than the latest Hollywood blockbuster. We’re convinced.” (And the one about food and sex.)
Complimentary in nature, the Slow Food movement has been around for years, espousing simply good, clean, fair food. The movement has chapters all over the world linked through their extensive website. I found out that Slow Food Boulder holds events, hosts a foodie book club, and provides a list of local vendors who support the Slow Food agenda.
If you have local food resources I haven’t mentioned, I’d love to hear about them!
Went to Trader Joe’s over the weekend while we were in Santa Fe. Oh Joe. You know I pine for you! When are you coming to Colorado????
Mostly picked up old favorites from TJ’s (like those dreamy boxed soups, tuna curries, cat cookies and dark chocolate raisins…), BUT! Got some new stuff last week at Wild Oats!
This a great article about processed food from one of my new favorite websites/magazines, eatingwell.com:
“People are so used to foods lasting forever,” says Slavin. “I think from a consumer standpoint, for people to say, ‘Well, I don’t want processed foods,’ they’re going to have to learn how to cook, be willing to shop regularly, learn how to store foods. It’s going to be this huge paradigm shift before we can get away from the processing that everybody is used to. As long as convenience is such a leading force in people’s lives, processed foods have to be there. People expect it, they want it. Are they willing to put more time and more money into less-processed foods? It’s a big decision.”
Wow, I’m gone for a few days and the world of organics explodes into controversy over this Time Magazine article about the benefits of local versus organic foods:
Nearly a quarter of American shoppers now buy organic products once a week, up from 17% in 2000. But for food purists, “local” is the new “organic,” the new ideal that promises healthier bodies and a healthier planet.
Read the article? Have an opinion? Which is better, the organic apple trucked in from across the country, or the conventional apple grown in your own state?
“When you see first-graders trying to make their classrooms carbon neutral, you know the word has become mainstream.”
–Erin McKean, editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary, which picked carbon neutral as its word of the year for 2006
[via The Green Life]
Becoming. Beautiful. Healing from binge eating disorder. 