Food

PepsiCo Introduces Greener Vending Machines

jplatt — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 08:00:00 -0400

Soda giant PepsiCo announced recently that it will soon deploy a small number of “green” vending machines that will "significantly cut pollution compared to standard vending machines."

The new machines -- which employ Greenpeace's Greenfreeze technology -- not only require 15% less energy than traditional vending machines, they do not use fluorocarbons or "F-gases," "greenhouse gases hundreds to thousands of times more powerful than carbon dioxide that are one of the major causes of global warming and are currently used in almost all U.S. refrigerators and air conditioners."

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, F-gases are currently responsible for 17 percent of global warming.

Now, Pepsi is only introducing 30 of these machines to start, since the Greenfreeze technology doesn't yet have EPA approval. But they do hope to roll them out around the world, where the company has a between 4 and 5 million vending machines and coolers.

You can read more about PepsiCo's environmental sustainability initiatives here.

Thanksgiving 101

scleaver — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:49:58 -0500

Top 10 Things to Try This Thanksgiving

10. Set Your Table

Outfit your table with these bright, autumn-colored hemp tableclothes, napkins, and placemats. All you have to do to find a great centerpiece is head outside, collect a bunch of pinecones, leaves, and evergreen sprigs to the table and you’ve got yourself some Thanksgiving décor.

9. Visit a Local Bakery

As you plan your dessert table, make at least one dessert hassle-free by checking out a local bakery at BakeryFinder for your pumpkin pies, carrot cakes, and turkey-topped cupcakes.

8. Get a Green Wine

Take a tip from Treehugger and put a bottle of sustainable wine on your table. Some options: the carbon neutral winery Mendocino Wine Company or LEED certified Stratus Winery.

7. Start Right

Get your Turkey Day off to a tasty start with a host of appetizers, from cheese balls to sugar coated pecans to the inevitable (in my house anyway) olive bowl.

6. Prepare for the Day After

Store leftovers in reusable, biodegradable storage containers from GreenHome.com. Then, get creative with your leftovers by trying out some creative turkey recipes, like Turkey and Black Bean Soup, a turkey or veggie pot pie, or the Moistmaker late-night turkey sandwich with enough tryptophan to put you right to sleep.

5. Save Room for Dessert!

Get organic baking ideas (or a delicious treat if you’re in the Los Angeles area) from Ghalia Organic Desserts or try one of the healthier treats from Eating Well, the pumpkin pie with rum sounds especially amazing.

4. Don’t Forget the Sides

As important as the turkey is, the sides are just as vital. Get an array of side dishes that will wow every guest. Try winter fruit salad with lemon poppyseed dressing, bread stuffing, or sourdough dressing with truffles. Browse even more sides at The Food Network.

3. Celebrate the Pumpkin

Pumpkin is the featured veggie at Thanksgiving, so take yours to new heights with pumpkin turnovers or curried pumpkin soup. Or, choose one of the many pumpkin recipes from the Pumpkin Nook's Cookbook.

2. Make Tubers Terrific

Thanksgiving comes with two potatoes—sweet and white. My suggestion, keep the white potatoes the way they should be, mashed. And make something delicious with the sweet ones, sweet potato cassarole or mashed with maple butter anyone? Or, go for a total spud surprise by adding Roasted Fingerling Potatoes With Dried Figs and Thyme to your table.

1. Make the Perfect Turkey

Follow the cooking directions at Organic Authority to cook an organic turkey and you’ll find that there’s more than one way to cook a turkey—in an oven, grilling, frying.

Here are the answers to every turkey question you could have on the big day. Happy Thanksgiving!

Photo from Vanelsas.wordpress.com.

Winter Squash 101

scleaver — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 10:25:39 -0500

Squash can be intimidating to work with, and for good reason. Apparently, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, there are more squash varieties sold now than have previously been in supermarkets. And, with such varied textures, colors, and shapes, it’s hard to know just which you can cut up and sauté, which should have their insides scooped out and pureed, and which should be put on the mantel for admiring only.

Here’s how to buy and use your winter squash:

When you’re in the produce aisle, look for a squash with a rind that’s unblemished without any soft spots. And, it should feel heavy for its size, the sugars in the squash add weight.

There are many types of squash, here are four that you’ll likely come across:

Butternut: shaped like a large pear with cream-colored skin, orange flesh, and a sweet flavor.
Acorn: have green skin with orange speckled patches and yellow flesh, has a sweet, nutty flavor.
Turban: green and speckled or striped, orange-yellow flesh that tastes like hazelnuts.
Hubbard: a large squash with dark green, grey-blue, or orange-red skin, not as sweet as other squash. (From Homestead Farm.)

After you choose your squash, store them in a cool, dry place for a few weeks so some of the starch can convert to sugar, and they can dry out a bit.

Instead of buying pre-hacked chunks of larger squash, like butternut, buy a big squash, cut your own pieces, and keep the rest chilled until you need more.

One way to cook your winter squash, cut it in half, roast it, and add a pat of butter before eating. Or, try a squash soup recipe from Homestead Farm, cook up a butternut squash with a recipe from All Recipes, or bake squash pie from Seeds of Knowledge.

Photo from What's Cooking America.

Halloween Candy Round-Up

scleaver — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:36:27 -0400

This Halloween, you can hand out the dreaded popcorn balls, my favorite Mary Jane Peanut Butter Kisses, or any combination of mini-candy bars, tiny bag of M&Ms, or an assortment of sugar-loaded candy corn. Or, you can go green.

To get you started, here are some candy suggestions from The Green Guide.

And some more delicious options:

Organic Yummy Earth lollipops and hard candy.

Mini chocolate squares or chocolate “bug bites” from Endangered Species Chocolates (10 percent of the profits go to support “species, habitat, and humanity”).

And, The Natural Candy Store has every type of candy, from caramels to licorice to jelly beans, and promises “all the fun without the funny stuff.”

And, to educate your little ghosts and goblins, check out fair trade chocolate bars and bags with the “Fair Trade Ghost” at The Global Exchange store.

What are you passing out this Halloween eve?

Photo from Good Without Gluten.

Take A Stand

scleaver — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:45:21 -0400

If you’re going to add your signature to one food petition this year, check out the Food Declaration or the Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture, started by Roots of Change. The Declaration, as the Eat. Drink. Better. blog explained, “calls for a visionary 21st Century Food, Farm, and Agriculture Policy” by moving away from the current industrial-ag system and into a cleaner, healthier system that’s more about health, accessibility, and affordability than the bottom line.

It’s currently in draft form, so check it out, comment on it, endorse it, or suggest your own declaration. You have until November 30, 2008. Next year, look for Slow Food International to be collecting signatures for the final Declaration that will, hopefully, end up in next year’s food policy agenda.

Image from Food Declaration.

Green Your Sweet Tooth

scleaver — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Hershey’s is “milk chocolate” no more; now it’s “chocolate candy” instead, because the company replaced the cocoa butter with vegetable oil in an attempt to reduce costs. But, as Eat. Drink. Better. reported, Hershey’s has never been the best at providing fair trade (not to mention green) chocolate anyway. So, with sweet tooth holidays from Halloween to Christmas approaching, here’s how to satisfy your chocolate fix and keep it environmentally friendly:

Eat organic: Organic chocolate is grown and harvested using eco-friendly methods and sustainable agriculture, as well as rBGH hormone free milk.

Look for fair trade labels: low wages, child slavery, and unsafe working conditions are a problem in the cacao industry, a fair trade label ensures that your delicious snack was harvested by farmers who were paid fairly and had safe working conditions. Learn more about that fair trade chocolate campaign at The Global Exchange.

Organic and fair trade chocolates are on shelves everywhere from Target to Whole Foods.

Go for artisan chocolates: Instead of going national, buy local or regional chocolates.

Looking for organic, fair trade, artisan on the web?

Try Coco Zen, Earth's Sweet Pleasures, or Dagoba Organic Chocolate for organic chocolate products. Equal Exchange for fair trade products. And, Theo Chocolate for organic, fair-trade and bean-to-bar.

Photo from Dagoba Organics.

The Little Things

scleaver — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:11:09 -0400

Here’s your weekend essay question: what would you do to take one small step to help change the food system?

As you mull that over, here are some suggestions from the Slow Food Nation blog:

1. Host an Eat-In or pot-luck with purpose where people bring dishes using locally prepared foods. Read our tips for planning a green pot luck.

2. Stop buying bottled water. More on bottled water, how to reduce your use of it, and other clean water options here and here.

3. Eat mostly unpackaged, local food for a week, Michael Pollen style—you don’t have to be all or nothing (you can incorporate organic sugar that’s brought in from, say, Michigan, if you live in Texas, or decide to include other products that might have to travel, like coffee or chocolate, that you can’t live without). With harvest time winding down and yummy things like apples and squash still on the shelves, it’s the last push for locavorism before winter sets in and it becomes more difficult to find local food. Read about how one eater handled it at the Slow Food Nation blog.

Photo from The Food Network article about how to cook with pumpkins.

Good Green Brews

scleaver — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:34:16 -0400

As summer winds to an end, the remaining evenings offer a few final days to enjoy a good beer garden. As you head off to your local microbrewery, look for an organic label on the front of your next bottle.

The main thing that separates organic craft brews from the pack, according to SlashFood, isn't necessarily the ingredients, but organic cleansers that are used to clean the brewing equipment. Apparently, ingredients aren't as much of a concern with organic beers because microbrews and craft beers are known for using good, quality ingredients anyway. But some beers are touting an organic label:

SlashFood found Four+ Brewing’s hoppy Wildfire Extra Pale Ale from Salt Lake City.

Peak Organic Beer out of Portland, ME sells a pale ale, brown nut ale, amber ale, and a maple oat ale that sounds especially delicious.

And, Wolaver's in Middlebury, VT sells ales and stout, including a pumpkin ale to lead us into fall.

As the microbrew trend continues into the winter months, what’s your favorite organic microbrew? Do you think there's much of a difference between your average craft beer and a good organic brew?

Photo from Wolaver's Brews.

Energy-Efficient Freezers Help You Store Organic, Local Food All Year Round

jplatt — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:13:49 -0400

We're off to a big organic food festival this weekend, and plan on coming home with a trunk full of local fruits and vegetables -- more than we can eat any time soon, but enough to keep us in good, local eats all winter long.

But before we can do that, we need to buy a new freezer. Our goal for this week is to pick up a dedicated unit (not a fridge-freezer combo), preferably a chest freezer like the one illustrated here.

Chest freezers, which have a lid on the top of of the unit rather than on the side, are 10% to 25% more efficient than upright freezers, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

According to the ACEEE, the most energy-efficient chest freezers on the market today at the Whirlpool EH151FXR (around $425) and the DC-powered SunDanzer (around $1,000).

The ENERGY STAR program offers several tips for buying energy-effienct fridges and freezers. (ENERGY STAR also recently upgraded its criteria for refrigerators, so the newest models are even more efficient than they were just six months ago.)

I don't recommend picking up a freezer unless you're going to stock enough food to fill it. But if you live in a area like me (coastal Maine) where the winters and long and local food is hard to come by, then a freezer could end up being your best friend.

A Real Hamburger Helper

scleaver — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 09:54:55 -0400

Figuring out your food miles will get easier by October.

As the Chicago Tribune reported, starting September 30, a new federal law will require meat labels that show the country of origin on beef, pork, chicken, lamb, as well as fruits, veggies, and some nuts.

Country of Origin Labels (also known as COOL) will tell you whether the animal was raised in the U.S. or another country so you can identify food that comes from countries with safety concerns, or so you can keep your food dollars in the U.S. But, some labels may be more complicated than you realize: ground beef labels may have more than one country listed, because the process to make a hamburger requires meat from more than one country.

As COOL starts up, some (the USDA, the Consumers Union) are against the law either because it doesn’t cover enough (the Consumers Union) or because they think consumers will know too much and are concerned about cost (the USDA). We’ll see how the COOL labels play out, but in the meantime, how much information do you want on your meat label?

Photo from the Dvorak Uncensored blog.