Earth Day Eating: 8 Ways to Go Green with Food and Gardening
1. Eat organic. Organic food is better for you, your kids and the environment, not to mention your taste buds. The Discovery Channel tells you exactly how.
2. Eat local. In our conventional agriculture system, food is shipped thousands of miles to reach your plate. That's a lot of fossil fuels to burn to bring you things you can sometimes find nearby. Check out this handy online tool to see where you can find food in your local community, which will have the added benefit of supporting the local economy.
3. Join a CSA. Community-support agriculture is a system in which community members pay in advance to receive weekly produce deliveries from a local farm, which helps small farms stay in business. Some CSAs have subscribers come work on the farm in exchange for a share, a great way to learn where your food comes from.
4. Go meatless sometimes. Producing meat takes a lot of resources, so the lower-meat our diets get, the lower our footprint on the Earth. Join the movement for a "Meatless Monday" by cutting meat out just once a week. Or more! Here are five vegetarian dishes to get you started.
5. Know your eating impact. Use this "Eating Green Calculator" from Center for Science in the Public Interest to measure your diet's impact on the planet.
6. Plant a garden. Nothing is fresher, tastier or better for the Earth than food you've grown yourself. If you don't have a yard, there are plenty of options for you. Make a vertical garden to secure to a wall, make a garden out of a hanging shoe rack, or in cute, little wall pockets. Alternately, look for a community garden near you.
7. Compost. If you have a garden, there's nothing it will love more than your old kitchen scraps turned into rich compost. Not only that, but stuff you throw away is perfect for plants in other ways. Putting crushed eggshells at the bottom of your seed holes will give an extra boost of calcium to tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant and stop slugs, snails, and cutworms in their tracks.
8. Get kids involved. Our country needs new farmers badly, so the more we can expose kids to the ways we grow our food, the better. Some of them might even get hooked. Find ways to get your kids on farms, in gardens and in the kitchen.
