Shopping is an American social pastime, but the problem is that shopping from “want,” instead of from “need,” causes the use of planetary resources we can’t afford to burn. We talked about this a little here. Yesterday, I mentioned how much fun my daughter Isabella had running out to a farm field to harvest vegetables. […]
local food
How to get your child to eat almost any vegetable
Ask my little girl Isabella what she wants to eat and it’s either a. grilled cheese sandwich or b. peanut butter and jelly. Suggest that she should eat her spinach, broccoli or brussels sprouts first and you get an encyclopedic explanation of why she can’t eat it–it doesn’t taste good, it’s too hot, you have […]
Urban gardening and connecting to nature
There are all sorts of reasons to farm food in the cities–reduction of the heat island effect, local food production, keeping storm water out of the waterways. But something happened to me the other day as a result of growing vegetables in my new garden plot that I wasn’t counting on. It’s been a dark […]
Growing your own food, Japanese style
First thing, wanted to remind you that I also twitter here and I friend my readers on Facebook here. Onwards… As you may know, Japan has lower per capita carbon emissions than any Western European country. For that reason, I asked my friend, Sean Saskamoto, who recently moved to Japan and who blogs at I’d […]
Keeping kids healthy by eating local and unprocessed food
A big part of the No Impact project was to eat only local, seasonal, unpackaged food. That meant, basically, lots of fresh vegetables. Michelle and I both lost a lot of weight. As though to prove how good eating a local-food diet is for kids, too, BusinessWeek writer Cathy Arnst has posted a story, which […]
Local, ecologically-sound and economically stable
Yesterday, I posted about how investment in a network of local economies rather than one big central economy by the Obama Administration could provide not only a more sustainable paradigm but one that is more socially and economically stable. Think of the Internet. Instead of all our requests traveling through one gigantic central server, information […]
Innovating business greenly
Meet Trevor Paque. He’s landscape gardener meets local food farmer. He rents himself to homeowners, but instead of planting and growing pretty flowers for them–and using the requisite water and chemicals–he grows them organic produce and leaves it in a box on their back porch. This apropos, partly, of yesterday’s post about innovation vs conservation. […]
Urban rooftop farming will save the world
I dedicate this post to the staff of Just Food, an excellent organization that works to ensure the availability of fresh food in all New York neighborhoods by supporting community gardening and forging connections between communities and local farmers. Read about Just Food here, but more importantly, throw money at them here. I am proud […]