Blogs : Green

The World's Cheapest, Greenest Oven

The BBC reports on an ingeniously simple oven which has won this year’s Forum for the Future Climate Change Challenge. Designed for use in the Third World, the Kyoto Box is made with cardboard and acrylic, packs flat for transportation, and costs less than $7 to manufacture. It harnesses the power of the sun to sterilize water and cook food without the need for electricity, gas, or—most importantly—firewood.

Granted, it may not be as fast as a microwave, but it can boil an impressive 10 liters of water in around two hours. Eliminating the need for firewood saves money, reduces greenhouse emissions, slows deforestation, and even helps save some of the many lives lost to indoor smoke inhalation each year.

Maybe someone should tell Alice Waters that she can finally get rid of that in-kitchen hearth of hers.

Posted by Keith Laidlaw | 0 comments
Tagged with: media, green, solar oven, bbc, kyoto box, alice waters

Veggie Trader Lets Home Gardeners Swap Their Crops

So all your lettuce mysteriously died but you ended up with a bumper crop of tomatoes. Now what? Enter Veggie Trader, a new site that connects home gardeners with one another to trade their surplus fruits and vegetables.

Here’s the drill:
• Register for the site (free)
• Post your veggies and browse others’ via zip code
• Negotiate a trade in your ’hood

A few things to be aware of when using the site: You are responsible for knowing about state quarantines (there’s currently one in the SF Bay Area), licensing, taxes, and all the local bureaucracy in your area. The site also recommends not trading out of your state because laws vary so widely. And you are forbidden from trading meat, eggs, or dairy items.

If you’re into the idea of community trading, bartering, and local food supplies, you might want to check out Fallen Fruit as well. It’s a site that’s aiming to eventually map all of the public fruit trees in the United States. And here’s what our etiquette columnist Helena Echlin learned from the site’s cofounder about picking fruit off your neighbors’ trees.

Posted by Roxanne Webber | 2 comments
Tagged with: backyard vegetable gardening, bartering, trading, local food, green, veggie trader, gardening, vegetables, surplus veggies, fallen fruit

The World's First CSF (Community Supported Forage) Box

Once upon a time, if you wanted to eat plant life, you had to hunt for it. Berries on bushes, fruit from trees, greens and herbs from the ground. If you could gather enough on your daily rounds, you could eat. If not, there was certainly no Kwik Mart where you could grab a nuked burrito and a soda.

In these days of scientifically farmed produce and feedlot meat, the ability to take what you need from nature seems almost mystical. Which is why scores of enthusiastic eaters in San Francisco are willing to pay $40 every couple of weeks to Iso Rabins, an urban forager whose perambulations in Bay Area parkland have produced the world’s first and only “wild-crafted” community supported forage (CSF) box through his fledgling firm, forageSF.

So what comes in the box? Wild mushrooms, nettles, greens, edible roots like radishes, all of it culled from the hills and valleys of the San Francisco Bay Area in a process outlined by local paper SF Weekly in this week’s spotlight on Iso Rabins and forageSF.

“On an unseasonably warm winter afternoon, Iso Rabins stepped out of a silver Subaru Legacy at the intersection of Walnut and Pacific streets, a tony corner of Pacific Heights that abuts the southern edge of the Presidio. Pausing to roll and light a cigarette, he hopped the waist-high stone wall lining the park. Behind him, rows of shingle and brick two-story houses climbed uphill into a bright February sky. As he stepped slowly and deliberately across an overgrown hillside bisected by a dirt walking trail, eyes trained on the ground like a man who had lost his wedding ring, the gentle ping of bats on baseballs rose from fields below. Suddenly Rabins froze, knelt, and began to nibble on a weed,” writes Peter Jamison.

“‘This is wild radish,’ he said absently, eyes scanning the ground as he masticated his find. ‘I’ve used it in potato salad, with wild salad greens. There’s a subtle flavor to it.’ A few more steps and Rabins came upon a patch of Claytonia perfoliata, or miner’s lettuce, so named for the 49ers who grew fond of the plant as a source of Vitamin C during the Gold Rush.”

The downsides of foraging? Park regulations, the possibility that finds are contaminated with animal pee, and the hard truth that nature doesn’t produce food to order. Oh, and there are some interesting details about poisonous mushrooms, still one of the easiest ways to kill yourself eating. Or just see some interesting hallucinations:

“In China … one infamous strain of wild mushrooms provokes an identical hallucination of xiao ren ren, or ‘little people,’ among all those who eat them. Many do so by accident — for example, after eating the culprit fungus in a dish prepared at a restaurant — and the resulting visions stir no more alarm among Chinese diners than an upset stomach.”

Image source: flickr member mecredis under Creative Commons

Posted by Joyce Slaton | 3 comments
Tagged with: foraging, food and cooking, foragesf, iso rabins, sf weekly, green, media, community supported forage box, csf

Is Your Yogurt as Green as You Think?

I have been happily eating Brown Cow yogurt for years now, and thinking that, beyond how good it tastes, it’s a fairly responsible choice. But I was astonished to see that GoodGuide rated Yoplait and Dannon yogurts above Brown Cow.

Packaged foods are a new category on the rating site, which scores products on their potential health hazards, as well as a company’s environmental performance and social impact. For the new food items, GoodGuide offers some additional nutritional analysis. The site seems to draw its data from reliable sources, and could be helpful in guiding choices in the supermarket aisle.

Though in some ways it might drive me out of the grocery store entirely: The breakdown of info on Brown Cow revealed that the brand is manufactured by Stonyfield Farm (whose yogurt got the top rating), which is owned by Groupe Danone (or mostly owned anyway), maker of Dannon yogurt. Maybe I’ll just start making my own.

Posted by Deborah Lewis | 11 comments
Tagged with: green, food and cooking, good guide, recycling, ratings, environment, plastic

Everything You Need to Know About Corn in Two Minutes

If you haven’t tackled the Omnivore’s Dilemma, and the documentary King Corn looks too much like a coming of age story (which it is), then this video by our friends at Good magazine will let you catch up on the world of corn in just two minutes. You’ll learn that half the ingredients in chicken nuggets are made from corn, that Americans ate over 1,500 pounds of it in 2006—there’s even “archival” footage of Squanto in the history section.

Still, the magazine itself is a bright star in a dying galaxy and if you don’t already, you should subscribe—100 percent of your payment goes to a non-profit of your choice and now it even allows you to set your own subscription price, which starts at $1.

Posted by Eric Slatkin | 2 comments
Tagged with: good magazine, corn, king corn, media, green, omnivore's dilemma