Shopping and Cooking, Chef-Style!

Every week, many of us grocery shop and then come home and over the next few days or so, cook or otherwise prepare and eat the food we bought. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But last week I did just that and it was great fun with a delicious outcome and lots learned in the process. What was different? Well, I did it all with fabulous zero-waste chef and food guru, Greg Christian.

Christian is well known in the culinary world for his pioneering initiative in sustainability as it pertains to food. He is a nationally recognized for developing the Organic School Project whose focus is to get healthy food choices into schools and help educate children on related topics. I'm personally very interested in the OSP, and you should be too! Greg also ran a zero-waste catering company for several years and is now doing consulting work for restaurants who want to learn how to practice sustainability or move toward zero-waste goals.

Zero-waste means that Zullo's, where Greg is currently consulting, doesn't have garbage service. They don't throw anything away. Everything is either cooked, composted, recycled, or otherwise reused. Imagine the impact on our landfills and out world if we all followed these practices! Other than being very careful about their inputs (not buying things with any or excess packaging for starters) they use re-purposed containers to hold re-useable items like rubberbands. It seems so obvious once you see it yourself, but it's really quite ingenious.

What was originally planned to be a trip to Zullo's kitchen to watch him cook, turned into a shopping trip to buy our ingredients on Wednesday and then making a wonderful soup for my family under his direction on Friday. We headed out to Chicago's famed Green City Market Wednesday morning to get our veggies, and as we walked through the grass, Greg invited me to try something new. Instead of having a list in mind and shopping with that agenda, he said you can learn how to ask what it is you need. Not what you want, or what a certain recipe calls for, but to just look and relax and see if anything jumps out at you. You might even want to hold it to see how it feels. It's the way that he shops and knowing what people need is a gift that he has, but Greg says you can hone that sense and your body and mind will benefit from it.

So I walked around looking at beautiful stacks of colorful, fresh organic produce with that in mind. I'm sure I don't have this gift, or have not yet discovered it if it's there, but what jumped out at me first were these unbelievably sweet, sparkling-red, juicy strawberries. They were so ready to eat their heady aroma hit me before I even reached the table! They were grown by Dave at Leaning Shed Farm, and he was a joy to talk with and get to know. Greg got some too, and boy did my whole family gobble them up...so was that something we needed? hmmm, guess so!

Along the way, Greg introduced me to several of the farmers and friends working the market booths. It was fun to talk to them and hear their stories...of surviving the latest tornado, retiring from a 9-5 gig just to work even longer hours doing what they love, and how they have found such benefit from connecting with the earth and eating such fresh fare. Here's a little video clip of our wheat grass shots being juiced (Thanks again, Greg!). What a great way to start a day. Pow!

At the same farm booth where we got our wheat grass, some dark purple leaves seemed to be calling my name. Maybe I needed them? What were they? Amaranth, I was told. They looked interesting and after we stood with them for a few seconds, Greg got an idea...why not make some soup with the amaranth for my family? How cool! Yes, let's do that! So I bought some amaranth, 2 kinds of young onions, baby swiss chard and some rainbow chard. Add to that black beans Greg gets from a fantastic farm and my chicken broth, and we had the makings of the tasty soup Greg would teach me to make on Friday morning...more on that later.

Our time at Green City Market ended at Zullo's tent, where I ate the most delicious lamb hand pie. It just melted in my mouth, and the pastry was light and tasty. They also offer up pizzas and focaccia, perfect for a hearty snack or a light lunch, and easy to walk around with. And of course good for any time of day, you must try their Zeppole - Zullo's version of apple cider doughnuts that simply are amazing. Served in a paper and newspaper cone, they are easy to pop into your mouth as you walk the market (and then you can recycle the cone!). Maybe a little TOO easy! Yum! You can find the up-to-date list of Zullo's markets here. My family likes to frequent them at the Logan Square Farmer's Mkt. Definitely check them out!

Fast forward 2 days...I met Greg at Zullo's kitchen super early
(as in, I was there at the early time that I usually unwillingly roll out of bed to tend to one of my small children. These guys don't sleep in!) and ready to work. I was set up at the sink and I washed all my produce and laid it out to await instruction. Doesn't that look beautiful? The dark purple leaves at the top right are the amaranth. Onions (white and "red") on the left and the rainbow and swiss chard on the right. Greg showed me how to cut and chop my bounty as we warmed up the chicken broth with the black beans. The cooking experience included a knife sharpening lesson and lots of info from how to make marinara to how to dry herbs, and the time flew by. I went home with enough delicious soup to feed my family 2 dinners and still had some left over for a lunch!. Here it is served up at home with some crusty homemade olive oil bread. I highly recommend you try it! The flavors are surprisingly complex for being made with such simple ingredients, and it's chock-full of healthy vitamins and minerals. I'll activate this link when my in-depth article covering as much of Greg's knowledge as I could absorb is published on Chicagonista.com, including the recipe for our soup: "Black Bean Soup with Stuff"! Don't forget to check it out (it will probably run by the end of the month). You can substitute ingredients depending on what you find at the market, and depending on what you feel YOU NEED. Now get cookin'!

Recharge Your Batteries and Enter Your Best Photo!

Energizer has teamed up with National Geographic to host the third annual Energizer Ultimate Photo Contest, and they want you to enter! All you need to do is sort through your best pictures and enter them here for a chance to get your photo published in the Dec issue of National Geographic. And get this: the grand prize is a National Geographic Expeditions trip for two to Greece! How cool is that?

The six categories are animals/wildlife, nature, people/cultures, travel, weather and action/energy, so keep that in mind while picking your favs. Pictures will be judged by renowned photographer Jim Richardson on how well they capture the essence of the theme (25%), their impact and creativity (50%), and composition/technical quality (25%). But don't be intimidated, last year one of the category winners was shot with a regular digital still camera! So go ahead and send in your most adorable shot of Fido in the park, your most awe-inspiring vacations pic, or the one of your children you love so much that you actually had it printed and framed (because if you're anything like me, that only happens if the photo is really special!). So you might have TONS of pictures to look through now. Or maybe you will be heading out to take some spectacular shots to enter. Either way, get going! You must enter before midnight the night of June 30th, so no procrastinating!

But the fun doesn't end there. As a special perk for my readers, I will be picking 3 lucky followers to EACH receive TWO 4-packs of Energizer Ultimate Lithium batteries! (And Energizer was kind enough to give me some to try as well - Thanks, Energizer!) Energizer's Ultimate Lithium batteries are an eco-friendly alternative to regular alkaline batteries in several ways. First off, they last way longer (up to 8 times as long!), so they create less waste. Second, they are made using lithium (duh!), which is the lightest known metal. This is important because most of the concern surrounding the environment is caused by heavy metal pollution and accumulation. Lithium is also a very "active" metal, so it can deliver a great deal of power while using less material and at the same time is 1/3 the weight of a "regular" alkaline battery. Two more attributes are that its construction is leak resistant, which is very important to the environment, and it has a storage life of 15 years so it won't lose its juice just sitting around waiting for its turn. All of these qualities make the Energizer Ultimate Lithium batteries a great choice for your digital camera or other high-tech device (or for your kid's favorite battery-operated toy...that is if you want it to "keep on going").

Sign up to follow the EcoActivista blog and then leave a comment below telling me your favorite color, and I'll enter you in my random drawing. It's that easy! You don't even have to necessarily enter the photo contest, but you should...what the heck, right? I know you want a free trip to Greece too!

Cloth vs. Disposable...it's NOT a tie!

Recently, in the wake of the Procter & Gamble media storm surrounding their new version of Pampers Dry Max diapers, the disposable diaper giant has been claiming that disposables are not worse overall than cloth diapers. Hmmm, really? They posted a Facts vs. Myths page that tries to sell this idea, but I'm not buying it. When reading results from skewed and biased "studies", it's really easy to believe something that sounds unbelievable...when you want to. Parents don't want to think about how much their diapering decisions are impacting the earth, filling our landfills and that they might be affecting the future health of their children. They want to do what's best, but sometimes that conflicts with what they have time for or think they can deal with. But I implore you if you are a parent of a child in diapers to read this and be patient with me as I plead my case. (if you want to skip reading about my whole cloth diapering experience, just skip to the bottom where I list the pros and cons or visit the Real Diaper Association)

When I first became a mother, I planned to cloth diaper, but I was scared that it would be more work, and the outlay of $$$ at the get-go seemed daunting. What if I bought a type of cloth diaper that I didn't like? It's not like you can just return them... And what if I couldn't handle it and gave up? The perfect solution seemed to be a diaper service, so I signed up. It turned out that I was an overstressed, under-rested new mother with a baby that seemed to cry all the time. Dealing with the cloth diapering service included forgetting to leave the diapers out for the service pickup on the right day, gagging at the stink that came from the pail when I had to toss dipes in near the end of the week, and forgetting to pay the new bill from the service that never seemed to send me a tangible reminder that it was coming due. It was all a bit more than I had bargained for and those little Swaddlers that came home with us from the hospital seemed SO much easier! By the time my son was 3 or 4 months old, I was over it. I figured I had given it a try and it just "wasn't for me". That's how I let myself off the hook, but every time I walked a stinky, heavy bag full of disposable diapers to the trash chute over the next 2 years, I felt a twinge of guilt, as I think many parents do. Yes, it's hard to pretend that you don't know exactly where all those bags are headed. And how long they'll be there, and how many other ones are heading there the same day, all over the world. How sad. Is this really the legacy I wanted to leave my baby?

The biggest problem for me was that all the other facets of my life were getting "greener and greener". So apart from the normal, "oh, I feel kind of bad that I'm throwing all these diapers away all the time..." guilt, I also had this part of my life and routine that seemed more and more incongruous as time went by. If I thought throwing away thin little paper napkins at each meal was such a big deal, why did I keep buying (and tossing) all these bulky, chemical-laden disposable diapers? I know why. Because I thought disposables were easier and I din't think I could handle it.

So, when I was pregnant with my second child, I started talking to some of the other moms I knew who cloth diapered at home. This seemed to make sense since we'd buy the diapers once, and then just RE-USE them. The only things we'd have to continue to buy would be detergent, and possibly wipes (but you can even use cloth wipes made of great fabrics like bamboo and flannel and just wash them with your diapers!). With a second baby on the horizon, the $$ savings was a draw. My husband estimated that instead of buying premium diapers for 2+ years, we would spend $2000 less by buying cloth diapers. That was a big selling point! We also went to a cloth diapering info session at BeByBaby, a local baby shop, and got to see all the different types of cloth diapers in person. Seeing how they were used, how they felt, and learning the pros and cons was really helpful and clinched the decision for us. That day, we bought a few cute covers, these cool little things called Snappis, and our pail and liner, as well as our special detergent (we bought Charlie's Soap), and were excited to get started when our baby entered the scene...

When she was born, we did use the disposables from the hospital, and didn't turn down the gifts of disposables from family and friends...but we knew that when they started to run out, we'd start up with the cloth. I think it might be smart, especially for new parents, to give yourself a couple weeks to just get used to the chaos of having an infant before jumping in to cloth diapering with both feet. When we started in earnest, my first impression was a bit of surprise at how easy it was! After a few more weeks, I bought some assorted types and brands of cloth diapers from an acquaintance so I could try them out before buying a whole stash of anything. Our experience was that the prefolds with covers worked best up until about 12 lbs, and then the pocket diapers seemed to become our favorites. Now we use a combination of 13 Fuzzi Bunz and Bum Genius pocket diapers with a couple prefold backups. I do 2 or 3 extra loads of laundry/week, which isn't a big deal since most moms feel like they do lots of laundry anyway, and since nothing gets wrinkled if I don't "fold" it right away, it's pretty low maintenance as far as laundry goes. The routine is easy, and we are not throwing any diapers away on a regular basis!! Now I feel so good about keeping our carbon footprint small, refraining from adding more diapers to the landfills and keeping chemicals off of our baby's skin. Plus, she looks adorable in a dress or tee shirt and a cloth dipe!

Here are the real comparisons from my viewpoint.

• First and foremost, there is way more waste involved in the manufacture, constant shipping, and disposal of disposable diapers. Even if creating, packing, and shipping created the same amt of waste for a cloth diaper as for a disposable (it doesn't), you'd have to multiply the number for the disposables by THOUSANDS for each baby, whereas the cloth dipe is only made, packaged and shipped ONCE.
• Some say the water used to clean cloth diapers tips the scales back to the center. It doesn't! It is estimated to take 2.3 times more water to make a new disposable diaper than to wash a cloth one...and that does not take the new HE washers into account. It is also estimated that the amount of water used to wash a load of diapers is equal to the amount of water that would be used to flush your toilet 5 times. So cloth diapering actually saves water over potty training! Ha!
• Cloth diapers are not more difficult to use. They have come a LONG way since the rubber pants over safety-pinned cloth. The "pocket-style" diapers we use in our family are so easy I don't even have to show babysitters how to use them. There are styles with alpix (hook and loop) closures or snaps, and both work great. Even when we do use regular cloth diapers, called prefolds (what my family thinks of as burp cloths), we use these cool Snappis to hold the cloth together...SO much easier, faster and more safe than pins!
• When you are out and about, it does seem easier to use a disposable that you can just toss. But I have found it's not more difficult to just put the used cloth dipe in a bag (I still just reuse produce bags from the grocery, but you can get these really pretty "wet bags"...) and then into the pail when you get home. Sometimes that's even proven easier than trying to find a garbage can!
• Like I mentioned my my personal story, Cloth Diapers actually SAVE you money over time. Pretty easy to win this one over disposables since I now feel like my baby's diapers are virtually free. Here is a link to a great, local, mom-owned company that has starter kits that make it really easily affordable to get started.
• Wetness that doesn't breathe causes diaper rash, and (most) cloth diapers are breathable. Disposables are not. Plus, they use all kind of questionable chemicals that have been cited to cause terrible rashes and blisters on some babies. Some of these chemicals are also known hormone disrupters and carcinogens. Do you want that next to your baby's butt?
• Cloth diapers are CUTE! They come in all kinds of colors and patterns and beat silly characters any day. Hands down.
• And last but not least on my list, is the fact that we need to ditch products that depend on petroleum for their manufacture. The major catastrophe happening in the Gulf of Mexico right now is directly related to our dependence on oil. We need to make some major changes, and getting rid of our abnormal dependance on disposable diapers is a big step in the right direction.

For more statistical information on Cloth Diapers vs. Disposables, please visit the Real Diaper Association.