Our Green Streets Blog

Food labels are often cumbersome or confusing.

James Kim

Interpreting food labels can seem like an overwhelming undertaking. To make your meal planning a little less confusing, check out this list of some of the most common food terms:

• “Local” should mean grown within 100 miles from where the food is sold.  However, there are not any government agencies reinforcing this term.  The best chance of getting something local is buying it from a farmer or farmer’s market.

• “Natural” is defined by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as “foods that are minimally processed and free of synthetic preservatives; artificial sweeteners, colors, flavors and other artificial additives; growth hormones; antibiotics; hydrogenated oils; stabilizers; and emulsifies.” However, the FDA explains, “Most foods labeled natural are not subject to government controls beyond the regulations and health codes that apply to all foods.” Determine for yourself if something is natural by reading the list of ingredients on the back of the package.

• “Certified” is a nebulous term. The Food Safety and Inspection Service defines this term as a product that was evaluated based upon a set of “quality characteristics.” A lot of butchers use this term and it is a better idea to buy a piece of meat that is certified or of higher quality than one that is not.

• “Fair Trade” is governed by a company named FLO-CERT, which defines itself as, “an independent International Certification company” that “assist(s) in the socio-economic Development of producers in the Global South and help(s) to foster long-term relationships and good practice with traders of Certified Fair Trade products.”  This helps to ensure that everyone who helped develop the product is offered a fair wage, including small farmers who live in countries with a lot of poverty.  It is a good idea; but as a label, it doesn’t speak to the quality of the product.

• “Organic” is described as food produced without the use of “most conventional pesticides; fertilizers made with synthetic ingredients or sewage sludge; bioengineering; or ionizing radiation.” A government-approved certifier must inspect and approve of the farm and food processing/handling companies also.  There are many different labels for organic.  One is “100 percent organic” and another is “organic” (95 percent).  Yet another is, “made with organic ingredients (70 percent or more) and “contains organic ingredients” (70 percent or less).

Keep these labels in mind when doing grocery shopping for meal planning.  Hopefully, this information has made these labels more useful for you to help plan those healthy meals!

James Kim is a writer for foodonthetable.com.  Food on the Table is a company that provides online budget meal planning services.  Their goal is to help families eat better and save money.

PHOTO: European Parliament

This guest post featuring some sound reasons not to eat meat every day of the week is written by Alexis Bonari. Thanks for the post, Alexis.

Photo source: http://vegfamily.com

What is arguably the easiest and cheapest way for each of us to help the environment?

The answer has nothing to do with a Prius or with buying an Energy Star-approved appliance.  All you have to do is replace one carnivorous meal a week with vegetables, legumes, and grains.  The Daily Green says that this would result in CO2 reduction equal to the removal of 500,000 cars from American roads alone

Although the people behind EarthSave would have all Americans entertain the idea of vegetarianism, the likelihood of this plan’s fruition is—let’s be honest—slim.  Even if it’s making 34 percent of us aged 20 and over obese and another 34 percent of us overweight but not obese, we love the Big Mac too much.  This might change if we knew the steps involved—and how much the earth suffered—in bringing said Big Mac from a single grain of corn to the neighborhood fast food joint.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations estimates that cows and other livestock across the world are accountable for 18% of our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Some of the causes for this 18 percent figure include:

• Deforestation of land for grazing
• Deforestation of land for farming to produce grain to feed animals
• Raising grains for feed
• Using fossil fuel fertilizers
• Using fossil fuels to harvest and transport grain and animals
• The burping (and, ahem, other emissions) of cows which release methane (a significantly more potent GHG than CO2)
• GHG-emitting manure produced by animals (3 tons for every American)

In fact, the calories fed to animals to produce one calorie of their meat leaves us—the consumers—in the red.  It takes 7, 4, and 2 kg of feed to produce just 1 kg of beef, pork, and chicken, respectively.  Calorie for calorie, humans are better off eating things that don’t bleed.

If we must indulge in meat—most of us do from time to time—try buying pasture-raised organic meat directly from farmers at farmers’ market.  Compare it to a store-bought steak and you will taste the delicious difference.

In addition to going meatless on Mondays, we can petition and push for action on various fronts.  The FAO recommends a range of measures, listed here:

• On Land degradation: Restore damaged land through soil conservation, silvopastorialism (combining forestry and grazing of domesticated animals in mutually beneficial ways), better management of grazing systems and protection of sensitive areas.
• On greenhouse gas emissions: Sustainable intensification of livestock and feed crop production to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation and pasture degradation, improved animal nutrition and manure management to cut methane and nitrogen emissions.
• On water pollution: Better management of animal waste in industrial production units, better diets to improve nutrient absorption, improved manure management and better use of processed manure on croplands.
• On biodiversity loss: As well as implementing the measures above, improve protection of wild areas, maintain connectivity among protected areas, and integrate livestock production and producers into landscape management.

Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and researcher for College Scholarships, where recently she’s been researching volleyball scholarships as well as wildlife science scholarships. Whenever she gets some free time, she enjoys watching a funny movie or curling up with a good book.

Mike Yohay is the founder and CEO of Cityscape Farms. Photo: Cityscape Farms

While a city may be dense with population, it is generally regarded as sparse with agricultural space, unless you hear Mike Yohay, the founder and CEO of Cityscape Farms, which specializes in creating urban farms wherever there happens to be growing space, from vacant lots to rooftops.

These smart solutions come from entrepreneurial sustainability companies like Cityscape Farms, which  provide urban greenhouse systems for agricultural production with low water use.

“By growing fresh food within just a few miles of where it will be eaten, we will have healthier, better tasting produce and make our cities cleaner and more self-sufficient,” says Yohay.

Important for city farming, the system for growing food has no soil because it uses an aquaponics system. Aquaponics is a method combining aquaculture (fish cultivation) with hydroponics. This approach to growing uses natural fertilizer from filtered fish effluent, creating a closed-loop, pesticide-free organic system:

Yohay says the aquaponics process works this way:

• Water containing natural fish waste gets filtered to become organic nutrient feed for the plants
• Plants absorb the nutrients and the cleansed water is recycled back to the fish tank

One perspective of rooftop farming from Cityscape Farms. Sourcwe: Cityscape

Yohay says he also offers a program to owners of commercial rooftops to monetize their roof by leasing it to Cityscape Farms. A Cityscape team of architects and engineers will develop “site-specific greenhouse systems that are consistent with local building codes and zoning laws. We address every liability concern to assure a safe, structurally sound installation that will earn you income that didn’t exist before.”

Other benefits: helping the environment and the local food economy. The systems that are used created their own nutrients for plant growth and require less water.

On his website, Yohay cites two influences in the development of Cityscape Farms:

“Attending college in Iowa, where I witnessed topsoil depletion and environmental pollution from large-scale corn, soy, and livestock agribusiness. The second was living in La Amistad rainforest in Costa Rica, where for a year I managed an eco-lodge and participated in low impact organic farming that supported our local community.

“Looking critically at these two extremes, I became determined to find a happy medium: a modern way to feed people on a large scale without spoiling the land, air and water.”

We received this uplifting correspondence from Maxine Mitchell, working at communications outreach for Steven Apfelbaum’s Applied Ecological Services (AES).

Steven Apfelbaum, founder of AES Photo: AES

Mitchell writes, “For more than three decades, Steve, and the AES team have developed land-use solutions to help farmers, companies, landowners, and communities around the world strike a balance between cost and ecology. From transforming dismal landfills and dusty iron mines into pristine preserves and prairies, Steve continues to show how ecosystem services result in healthy wild, rural, and urban landscapes while boosting the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit.”

She included an article for Green Streets to share that Mr. Apfelbaum recently wrote concerning the Gulf of Mexico and its unhealthy status even before the oil drilling disaster caused by the Deepwater Horizon accident. What he proposes here should be seriously considered by all communities, landowners, businesses and farmers wanting to help turn overwhelming problems into solutions. And while this post is longer than usual, it is very much worth reading and sharing.

Apfelbaum’s article follows (our emphasis marks provided):

Read more of this >>

IDE's water technologies have had an important impact on poor rural farmers in developing countries. Photo: IDE

In Denver, an important art exhibition from developing countries opens in Denver, along with another feature concerning sustainability and affordable water technologies. The exhibition, titled, The Art of Dirt, has been organized by Denver-based IDE The exhibition takes place at the EventGallery 910 Arts and will run through September 25.

According to IDE, The Art of Dirt allows visitors to learn how simple, affordable technology design has improved the incomes and lives of the millions of people at the base of the economic pyramid. The exhibition includes photographs, videos and a tomato garden growing in the gallery that has been irrigated using IDE water technology.

Read more of this >>

Land monitoring

This June the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI), founded after the man who made the geodesic dome a household word, awarded its 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge prize of $110,000 to African-based Operation Hope for its promising work to transform degraded Zimbabwe grasslands and savannas into a sustainable environment.

The grand prize was well deserved. Here’s why: smart land management work like this can foster water and food security for millions of impoverished people that have suffered for years without such living basics. Read more of this >>

It is high time to begin learning more about the benefits biochar might provide to all of us living on this planet, especially when considering the agricultural practice from South America is over twenty centuries old.

According to the Internationasl Biochar Initiative, sustainable biochar is a “powerfully simple tool fight global warming.”

“Sustainable biochar is one of the few technologies that is relatively inexpensive, widely applicable, and quickly scalable. IBI focuses on the need for quality and sustainability standards and assurances in the emerging biochar industry,” the website reports.

South America: students with biochar stoves Source: Biochar Initiative

For those wondering what kind of new invention bichar might be,  it is not new at all. The practice has been around for almost 2,000 years, where it was practiced in South America. The product, called terra preta, or “dark earth” that converts agricultural waste into a soil enhancer, or fertilizing agent.  But beyond acting as a soil enhancer, proponents claim biochar has the capacity to hold carbon. It is being produced in the United States, South America, and Australia, to name a few producing locations.

Biochar is a charcoal produced under high temperatures, using crop waste, animal manure, and other organic waste.

According to Kelsi Bracmort, an analyst in agricultural conservation and natural resources policy, “The combined production and use of biochar is considered a carbon-negative process, meaning that it removes carbon from the atmosphere.”

Take a thorough look, we shall be reporting far more on this product.

Praise for Ghanaian micro business

Weeds rarely are welcome in the garden soil. Getting rid of them is normally an arduous procedure with more bad sides than good sides, including blisters, aching backs, and time passed, which might have been better spent elsewhere. The one good side from weeding is probably the dead-tired, ‘sweat on your brow’ reward of seeing your garden rid of the unwelcome invasion.

Ghanaian villagers strip bark from invasive weed tree so it can be used for erosion control. Photo: G. Meyers

But if you’re an itinerant farmer in Ghana, living near the Brong Ahafo gold mine of Newmont Ghana Gold Limited, one weed features another good side: it is being converted into a cash crop.

This weed, called Broussonetia papyrifera, or York, can consume arable land in a short time, growing 25-meter trees and a system of seeds and shoots that turns food-producing areas into wastelands.  Ghanaians may once have called it Devil’s Teak, now they see it as a raw material that can bring income to the villagers of Techeyre, who operate a micro business making biodegradable matting that is used for erosion control and slope stabilization at the nearby mining operation.

This micro business jute mat operation was conceived by Muhammad Bin Abubakar, an outspoken Newmont nursery manager who has left behind a large trail of good work, including growing a shaded forest where once there were only mining tailings. Bin, as he is known, says he learned of a way to use the tree when he worked at Newmont’s Indonesian operations.  According to Bin, one farmer, Amoafo Darkwah had to abandon his family’s two-acre cassava farm because of York infestation.

Project developer, Bin Abubakar, works with village members. Photo: G. Meyers

In the village of Techeyre, some 800 people, including Darkwah, join in stripping bark from these trees.  Bark stripped, the trees die within two weeks and will stop producing seeds. The dead timber can be used for minor construction needs or for cooking fuel, and much of the sawdust is used for growing at Bin’s nursery.

Then it’s time to treat the moneymaker, the bark. The fibrous material, taken from the bottom part of the tree, measures an average of one meter by five meters. This solid piece is first hammered flat so the fibrous structure can be pulled out, or woven into a continuous net material. The hammering process, where large hand-hewn mallets are used, resonates throughout the village with the sound of drums.

As Bin describes it, “ The mat is then woven into a mesh, just like chicken mesh, thus giving it the ability to trap eroded soil particles during storm periods.”

Beyond the environmental functionality of the jute mats, there is the micro business that has provided income for some 800 people where money or paying work are as scarce as the York is plentiful.

The difficulties posed by the York have been transformed into a solution, says Bin.

“So the jute mats are used for controlling erosion in our mining areas. Which now accounts for 800 people – ladies, men, and students in this area. And they are getting their livelihood from this work.”

We hope more micro businesses such as this one Bin has started begin popping up across Africa and other developing areas of the planet.

Mark Edwards, PhD

For those wanting more information on algae and its low-carbon potential as an alternative fuel source, take a visit to Oilgae , a blog focused on this subject.

Some might even want information on how to grow their own. Below are clips from today’s post:

“Cultivation of Algae in Photobioreactor”

“Algae can also be grown in a photobioreactor (PBR). A PBR is a bioreactor which incorporates some type of light source. Virtually any translucent container could be called a PBR, however the term is more commonly used to define a closed system, as opposed to an open tank or pond.

Read more of this >>