According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), over the 2016 Thanksgiving holiday in the US, “six million turkeys—a value of roughly $293 million—ended up in the trash.” Producing that much discarded turkey “requires an estimated more than 100 billion gallons of water (enough to supply New York City for 100 days). And when it […]
Thanksgiving
8 Make Ahead Staples for a Low-Waste Thanksgiving
Cooking without producing waste requires some planning but not that much. Cooking Thanksgiving dinner without waste needs a bit more planning. I don’t like to leave all my prepping for Thanksgiving to the day before or day of. I like to sleep. So this week and continuing on the weekend, I’ll prep a bunch of […]
18 Ways to Waste Less at Thanksgiving Dinner
The biggest food day of the year in the US will soon be here. These ideas will help you waste less. 1. Keep it simple For this post I did a bit of research into a typical Thanksgiving dinner. I checked out menus on the website of a popular, mainstream magazine site and found them […]
How to Cook a Whole Pumpkin in a Pressure Cooker
Homemade pumpkin purée tastes so much better than store-bought. For several years now, I had been roasting small whole pumpkins to make purée. That works well. Basically, you stab the pumpkin a few times around the top, roast it for about 45 minutes and purée the flesh. You can read a post about that here. However you […]
How to Scale Back During the Holidays
Some might say I go too far. When compared to the average consumer, I may seen downright nutty. But I believe that decades ago—before mass consumer culture kicked in—I would have seemed fairly normal. Well, let’s say normal as far as my consumption patterns go… As I have said many times, I’m not extreme, our […]
5 Activities for Buy Nothing Day, Formerly Known as Black Friday
Updated 11/27/20 Buy Nothing Day (previously known as Black Friday) may come around just once a year but you can embrace it year round. Adbusters launched the day in the early 1990s to protest the consumer madness that kicks off in the U.S. (and now all over) the day after Thanksgiving. You can read more […]
Kick the Can[ned Pumpkin]
Go here for cooking a whole sugar pie pumpkin in a pressure cooker. I can’t remember the last time I bought a can of food, including canned pumpkin. When we went plastic-free in 2011, we ditched all canned food. Cans are lined with plastic that often contains BPA, which according to the Environmental Working Group, […]