This past Saturday, I participated in Feeding the 5000, a campaign that exposes food waste by feeding thousands of people a free, delicious meal prepared with food that would otherwise go to waste. Feeding the 5000 began in Europe in 2009, but Saturday marked its debut in America. The event’s name invokes the story of Jesus feeding 5,000 people with a […]
cooking
5 Ways Reducing Waste Can Reduce Your Waistline
If you have tried to lose weight to no avail, you may want to cut down on your waste rather than counting your calories. 1. To quote my friends at Plastic Free Tuesday, plastic makes you fat. Many plastics contains BPA, a synthetic estrogen. According to Dr. Robert Lustig, the UCSF pediatric endocrinologist made famous by his […]
Solar Cooking Festival
“If you can see your shadow, you can cook.” Pass this litmus test and a solar oven can make your dinner, according to one of the solar chefs who demonstrated this past weekend at the Sacramento Solar Cooking Festival, hosted by the nonprofit Solar Cookers International. He was one of about twenty-five impressive solar chefs demonstrating their […]
Tomato Sauce from Scratch!
Click here to go straight to the recipe. My coworkers know I don’t use plastic, and so they ask me lots of questions, such as: “How do you wash your hair?” (Baking soda followed by a cider vinegar rinse.) A recent midday email from my boss: “How do you take out the trash without a […]
Easy, Quick-Start, Overnight Irish Oatmeal
I stopped eating cereal after visiting an organic farm in the Caribbean in 2011. We ate organic homemade granola for breakfast every morning, topped with freshly harvested coconut milk and tropical fruit. After that, I purged store-bought cereal from our diet. You can’t make out some of the prices in the pic of the Safeway […]
How to Cook Black Beans
Click here to go straight to the recipe. Updated 01/19/21 Update 07/16: I now have a pressure cooker and cook my beans in that. IT IS SO FAST! Read more here. I don’t eat canned beans (or canned anything for that matter), for several reasons: Cans are lined with plastic that often contains BPA. Because […]
Zero-Waste Vegetable Broth from Scraps
I love to make soups, but I hate to buy broth for several reasons: If you read the label of virtually any commercial broth on the shelf at the grocery store, you’ll probably find loads of salt and—depending on the brand—crud. Canned broth can expose you to the hormone-disrupting chemical BPA. Food and beverage cans […]