Farmers Market Locator

Following in the footsteps of their fabulous Gardening Calendar, The Washington Post put up a great interactive pinpointing local farmers markets. You can even browse by day. How great is that?!

If you need another reason...

...to stop drinking bottled water (and trade in any dangerous Nalgene bottles for their new and improved BPA-free ones), read this article reporting the findings of an impromptu study performed at the Harvard School of Public Health. Some highlights:

...Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health found that people who drank for a week from the clear plastic polycarbonate bottles increased concentrations of bisphenol A - or BPA - in their urine by 69 percent...

...Numerous animal studies in recent years suggest that low levels of BPA might cause developmental problems in fetuses and young children and other ill effects. The health effects on adults are not well understood although a recent large human study linked BPA concentrations in people's urine to an increased prevalence of diabetes, heart disease, and liver toxicity...

...Led by Jenny Carwile, a Harvard School of Public Health doctoral student, 77 Harvard students in the study drank all cold beverages from stainless steel bottles for a week to wash BPA out of their bodies and minimize exposure. Most BPA is flushed from people's bodies within a matter of hours. During that week, the students gave urine samples. Then the students were given two refillable polycarbonate bottles made with BPA to drink all cold beverages from for one week. Urine samples taken over that week showed the students' BPA levels spiked the second week to levels normally found in the general population. Because the students did nothing different in their schedules other than drink from the BPA bottles, the researchers determined their urine concentrations largely came from the bottles...

Windows to our souls?

Mark Menjivar for Good Magazine, put together this very cool picture show showcasing the contents of strangers’ refrigerators. It's a little voyeuristic but nonetheless, I suggest checking it out. Mine - leftover Chinese food, sparkling cider (clearly from Christmas) and all - is pictured above.

But of course!

Guess what, folks? I found out the secret to a healthy life in the unlikeliest of places: a Chinese restaurant (which, I should add, was pretty much the only place open last night). Check it out:

The fortune says: A good way to keep healthy is to eat more Chinese food.

"Soil Not Oil"

I've been meaning to link to this interview with Vandana Shiva, India’s leading environmental activist, in the Urbanite's April Green Issue for weeks now but I guess I let those peonies take precedent. The tension between traditional and industrial agriculture is a big and important issue that needs to be addressed globally. From the interview:

Q But if you have to feed more than a billion people, as farmers in India do, isn’t it impractical to hang on to traditional farming methods?

A Here, they want to connect all of India with superhighways, and 90 percent of the roads haven’t been built. They won’t be built because of the financial collapse. So this huge dream of a totally motorized world and tractorized agriculture is already failing in front of our eyes. It failed in Cuba under very tragic circumstances—under [the U.S.-imposed] trade embargo. But they rebuilt their agriculture [based on] principles that ancient cultures practiced. Now I don’t call that being locked into tradition. It’s highly innovative.I see fossil-fuel-free farming as a future of agriculture—not because of nostalgia, not because of romanticism, but because of a very hard-nosed realism. If your fertilizer prices have tripled in the past year, there is no way to carry on depending on chemical fertilizers. If your phosphate requirements in chemical agriculture are going to run out in the next twenty years, you’d better get ecological, organic sources. To depend on an agriculture that requires oil inputs at every step would be developing a system at this point that has no future.

Expect to see Shiva's book, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis on my list of recommendations once I pick it up and finish it.

peony perfection

drumrolll please...

kale is the new black

Adrian Higgins blogs about the "fabulous" crop in the Washington Post's All We Can Eat.

"double helping of global ramifications"

I highly recommend taking some time to read the special report on the global food crisis, The End of Plenty, written by Joel K Bourne Jr and with photographs by John Stanmeyer, in the June issue of Nat Geo. It offers a great perspective on the past, present and future of grain production, health ramifications of the increasing demand (like those discussed in a previous post about Punjabi farmers), population growth, and the desperate need for another green revolution.

The Great HFCS Debate

Slate's Green Lantern has been examining the impacts of sugar and HFCS and most recently responded to a question regarding the environmental effects of each in May Cause Earth Decay. The bottom line is that while a large percentage of farm acreage in our country is devoted to corn, and "According to anti-corn crusader Michael Pollan, modern corn hybrids require more pesticides and more fertilizers than any other food crop [which] this not only requires major inputs of fossil fuels but also causes significant groundwater pollution," - only 5%-7% of America's total grain corn production ends up as corn sweetener. The largest percentage (around 50%) ends up as animal feed. No surprise there.

So as always, moderation is the key for any sweetener and according to the Lantern's research: sugar cane seems to be the most efficient producer although there is a heavy water usage component there.

Is it just me, or do most of my posts here on justsaying end in a suggestion to cut back on soda and red meat consumption? Hmmm... "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants"