Meatless Monday: Tools You Can Use

Now that the Apocalypse scare is behind us, we can contemplate the beginning of summer and its first long weekend, just a few days from now. Whether you spend time at home or away, food will most likely play a big role in your holiday plans. Here are a few tools to help you eat well and sustainably, while providing abundant opportunities to discover something new.

Perhaps a staycation is in your future. Check out the Pick Your Own website, where you can find local listings for Pick Your Own (PYO) farms in the US, Canada, Britain and various other locations around the world. Strawberry season is just around the corner in Connecticut where I live. On the West Coast picking for several crops has already begun. Support your local farming communities while having some fun and saving some money. Often the price per pound gets lower the more you pick.

Mountain View, California Farmers' Market

The LocalHarvest site is another great tool. I suggest starting at the home page where you can enter your zip code and define what you are looking for, from farms to restaurants to farmers’ markets. If you don’t want to leave your home, you can even shop online. 

The Eat Well Guide allows you to find good food wherever you are — at home or on the road. Find sustainable food options by entering a keyword, zip code, or city/state. This guide has a great feature for travelers. If a road trip of any length is in your future, use Eat Well Anywhere to help plan a route allowing you to eat good food along the way. The Eat Well Guide is a program of the GRACE Communications Foundation. 

Here’s to a summer of good eating.

Have a great week. And come back again soon.

I try to blog on food or food issues each Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.”

Freebie Friday 3.25.11

Worthy Things to Do, Listen To, or View that Won’t Cost You a Dime

TGIF. Welcome to another edition of Freebie Friday. Food/Eating is the theme. Once again it’s a three tip Friday. 

• First up is the National Institutes of Health’s Portion Distortion Interactive Quiz. You may have heard that portion sizes in restaurants have become larger over the past 20 years. Once you take this short, 2-part quiz you should have no remaining doubts about just how much Americans have “biggied up” in the last two decades. Along with the new calorie counts, the answer section lets you know how much exercise it would take to burn up the difference in calories. Part I starts with a bagel and ends with a turkey sandwich. Part II covers coffee, muffins, pizza, and more. 

• Next is the Eat Well Guide which allows you to find good food wherever you are — at home or on the road. Find sustainable food options by entering a keyword, zip code, or city/state. You can use Eat Well Anywhere to help plan a road trip allowing you to eat good food along the way. The Eat Well Guide is a program of the GRACE Communications Foundation. 

• Finally, I offer up The Meatrix, the first in a trilogy of animated shorts inspired by The Matrix. In the first episode Moopheus introduces Leo the pig to the reality of The Meatrix (the factory farm), “the lie we tell ourselves about where our food comes from.” The second installment covers the dark side of dairy farming, and the third, meat processing facilities. Be warned that these shorts are not for young children. The site is rich in content for further education and action steps. The Meatrix is a project of the GRACE Communications Foundation and Free Range Studios.

TGIF. Be sure to visit again on Monday for my third and final installment on the nutritional content of fast food. Have a great weekend!

FYI Why a piñata? Just like a blog link, until you open it, you won’t know what’s inside.