Ending food waste, keeping perfectly good food out of landfills and feeding people who need a little help in your own community. It’s easier than you might think. Have you ever wondered where all the leftover food from places like your local supermarket or restaurants ends up? How about the gorgeous produce that remains after…
CropMobster has saved tons of food from being wasted by connecting excess farm produce with people who want it. Sometimes food is free or reduced to half price.
You don’t need to live in the deep woods to find foraged foods. From herbs to berries to mushrooms, you can find an abundance of food if you know how to look. Why forage? To take part in an industrial agricultural system means to be dependent on a system of food cultivation over which one…
With the appropriate planning, you can save money this holiday season without throwing your food ethics out the window. Forget canned green beans, factory farmed turkey and pre-packaged stuffing. This year, serve your family a healthy, delicious holiday feast and avoid food waste. The winter holidays are all about abundance—being surrounded by friends and family,…
The restaurant takes pride in its impeccably sourced fish. Bamboo Sushi works in partnership with the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Marine Stewardship Council to serve not only fish that is certified sustainable, but often locally caught. The menu changes seasonally, as fish is a seasonal food.
We’re so over single use restaurant to go containers! Whether you’re taking home leftovers from your restaurant meal or getting your favorite food as takeout, you can avoid using disposable containers by choosing one of these easy, convenient reusable options.
Plastic or Ceramic? We road tested two reusable travel mugs for coffee and tea on the go. Both had pros and cons, and of course, there are other reusable coffee cup options, such as insulated stainless steel or double walled glass.
Restaurants with roots Restaurants across the country are now boasting farm to table fare on their menus, sourced from local farms or, increasingly, a farm of their own. But not all can present their patrons with the farm just outside the restaurant doors. Restaurants with integrated onsite farms invite diners beyond the table to the…
Who knew that bringing that brown bagged lunch to school or work every day added up, not just in cost but in environmental degradation? Investing in one of these reusable lunchbox sets will save you money over time, and lighten the load on our landfills.
Nugget Markets partners with local food recovery program to feed those in need In Marin County, one of the wealthiest counties in America, one in five residents is food insecure. That’s nearly 50,000 people in Marin, half of them children and elderly, who don’t have a steady supply of nutritious food on which they can depend. Many…
Fresh, healthy, nourishing food is a human necessity. However, in modern society, food often comes with high out-of-pocket and environmental costs, is increasingly depleted of nutrients and is produced miles from where it is enjoyed, offering consumers little to no connection to the farmer or the growing process. These troubling aspects of modern food production…
Very few of us ever recycle plastic bags or wraps, especially when we are on the go. What does this mean for the big picture? In the US alone, our landfills are packed with an extraordinary portion of the 380 billion plastic bags and wraps that we consume each year, which can take hundreds to thousands of years to degrade. As far as cost goes, ECOlunchboxes.com released a report that an average family with two children and one parent packing lunches spends around $132 on plastic bags alone annually, not taking into account the cost of disposable utensils, napkins, and…
How to save money in the kitchen that you can use towards buying clean, sustainably produced foods. On our Ethical Foods on a Budget page we list numerous ways in which you can lower your grocery bill. Often, however, it isn’t very easy to get around the expense of buying sustainably produced foods. For instance I am an…
Vegan is going mainstream It wasn’t long ago that eating vegan was a difficult thing to commit to, and eating out was nearly impossible. The past few years have seen interest in plant based eating on the rise in the United States, and with it a flourishing of vegan cuisine. Whether you’re baking up a…
Grow Dat On our farm we work collaboratively to produce healthy food for local residents and to inspire youth and adults to create personal, social and environmental change in their own communities. Grow Dat is a place where people from different backgrounds and disciplines come together in research and practice to support public health, local…
Use an inexpensive dehydrator to make the most of a season’s harvest, and to make sure your pantry is stocked with high quality, real ingredients. It’s easy to dry your own fruit using an inexpensive dehydrator, and the taste and nutritive value are much better than store-bought dried fruits.
Our best tips to help you eat nutritious, local, ethical and organic food for less 1. Drastically reduce the amount of processed foods you buy Processed foods can cost five times as much as home made, and often the ingredients are low quality. Even certified organic processed foods can actually contain more filler, sugar and…
Louisa Shafia, author of Lucid Food and The New Persian Kitchen, shares her views about sustainability and some easy to follow tips on eating well.
Is a raw food diet affordable? Is it possible to eat a raw food diet in the winter? In an interview with Ani Phyo, author, teacher and celebrity proponent of gourmet raw food, EthicalFoods.com learns a thing or two about going raw.
The Bounty Hunters glean fresh food that might otherwise go to waste—from back yard fruit trees and gardens, from local orchards and farms. The organization then redistributes their bounty to food banks and senior centers.
Vacant lots in Philadelphia are getting a makeover. They are being turned into self sustaining urban edible food forests.
The next time you run low on fruits and veggies, instead of driving to the grocery store, how about taking the kids on a trip to the food forest to see what’s in season? Seattle is creating just such an edible landscape. Imagine yourself in a forest in which almost every plant, shrub, and tree…
Owen Dell discusses creating resilience and food security in communities through intelligent and organized communal food exchange.
Solar ovens are an elegant solution to cooking food with a minimum of effort, no fuel and zero carbon emissions. Best of all, the food tastes great.
Pet food has become a convenient market for waste from meat and grain producers which are deemed inedible to humans. But what are these ingredients?
Buying organic, local and sustainably raised food can wreck your grocery budget. Joining a Community Supported Agriculture scheme can help keep costs down, while providing you with an abundance of clean, locally produced food.
The US produces more than 100 aquatic species for consumption, making the management of these fisheries an important topic in both environmental and ethical terms. As the demand for sustainable seafood increases, so has the focus on sustainable seafood practices in a chef’s culinary education.
It used to be that to-go packaging, save Chinese take-out, was made out of Styrofoam which came complete with a set of plastic cutlery. Today restaurants are switching to packaging made from biodegradable plastics or recycled paper products, printed with vegetable-based inks. Whether through a restaurant’s own motivation or a city’s ordinance, the world of to-go packaging is looking increasingly compostable.
The demand for biodegradable packaging has taken off in the last few years and subsequently a growing number of businesses are sending out your takeout in bio plastic packaging. But what is this stuff that looks like plastic, feels like plastic, yet isn’t plastic?
Restaurants are a significant source of pollution—from food waste to spent cooking oil to toxic chemicals. Eden Canon explores the ways in which the restaurant industry is cleaning up its act. From making simple changes, such as setting up recycling programs, to working with the city to turn spent cooking oil into biofuel that run city buses, restaurants are taking up the challenge to go green.
A long-standing stigma attached to taking leftovers home has hindered British and European diners from tackling waste reduction at the restaurant table. Three new movements have sprung up in the UK, Sweden, and Italy to promote the benefits of taking home leftovers, signaling a shift in opinion towards the doggy bag in Europe.
These eco friendly ideas make great gifts on their own, or thoughtfully curated into sustainable gift boxes for friends, colleagues and neighbors. Eco Friendly Tech Tech products are notoriously difficult to recycle. Here are some eco friendly options. Nimble For Good. Eight day fast portable charger, made from plant bioplastics and recycled aluminum. They don’t…
Our top six tips for a healthy, sustainable and locally sourced holiday dinner. Save money, avoid waste and enjoy a wholesome, humane feast.
Sometimes sustainability is equated with upscale restaurants that specifically market their local and sustainable credentials. But what about your favorite pizza joint, or the place where you pick up a quick salad on the way home from work, or the bakery that supplies your daily bread? To really make a difference, sustainability has to take…
For some people, adopting a strict vegan or vegetarian diet — whether it’s for health, social, environmental or animal welfare-related reasons — can be a challenge. Embracing the flexitarian approach, however, offers meat lovers the perfect, self-determined degree of wiggle room. Flexitarianism simply advocates plant-based diets that include the occasional steak or pork chop, allowing adherents the flexibility…
How to cook, clean, reduce waste and shop for the healthiest food within your budget Creating a sustainable kitchen Our best tips for cooking, not-toxic cleaning, and how to reduce, reuse and recycle kitchen waste. Find affordable eco-friendly trash bags Shop for BPA-free food and kitchenware Find deals on your favorite organic foods Kitchen gloves…
Last year, the United Kingdom saw two opposite ends of the weather spectrum—drought and flooding—causing millions of pounds in property and crop damage. Learn how climate change is affecting crops, livestock, farmers, prices and lives in the UK.
On our tour of Bobby Foehr’s egg farm, he explains what it takes to start a small chicken farm, the difference between pasture raised and free range eggs and why he is not certified organic.
How to cook healthy, home made meals and snacks your kids will love. We all know by now that the best way to ensure healthy eating is to get in the kitchen and cook. Cooking your own food allows you to know and control what’s in it, and to source the best quality ingredients. But for many there is a gulf between knowing they should be cooking more and actually figuring out how to put home cooked healthy meals on their family’s table and in their kids’ lunch boxes day after day. That’s when clean food bloggers like Jacquelyn of…
If you think of Texas as dry and dusty, Houston will surprise you. It’s hot, sure, but also humid, almost lushly so, thanks to its location on the Gulf of Mexico. That prime seaside spot also lets chef Evans play with a wide variety of seafood. The result? Dishes like his signature shrimp corn dogs with Tabasco mash remoulade.
At Blue Hill at Stone Barns, “farm to table” means that the land you see outside the restaurant window is the land where the food on your fork was grown. Located in the Pocantico Hills in New York’s Hudson Valley region, Stone Barns Center occupies 80 acres filled with pasture, a greenhouse and even a bee colony.
Defining sustainability in the restaurant industry, let alone measuring it, has proven to be an incredibly difficult task. A range of new businesses have emerged to help analyze a restaurant’s sustainability as well as provide certification for businesses to stand as a visual indicator to their customers of a restaurant’s ethical values—helping diners make smart choices.
Margot McNeeley, founder of Project Green Fork in Memphis, Tennessee, talks to EthicalFoods.com about the challenges of helping restaurants move toward sustainable practices.
Restaurants with their own farms gain a unique appreciation for what it takes to produce quality food. Chef Alex Seidel has gotten a lot of positive attention for his expertly prepared, eco-conscious cuisine at Denver’s Fruition Restaurant. The Wisconsin native was recognized in 2010 by Food and Wine Magazine as one of the best new…
Meet Shanti Allen, Executive Chef and founder of Alchemy, Ubud’s first completely raw vegan restaurant. Shanti meets me for our interview in a sundress and sandals, her long blonde hair loosely braided to one side. I follow her through the kitchen, where a bank of food dehydrators are concentrating flavors, and creating the textures raw…
On the forefront of developing sustainable, community enhancing food systems in Bali, Indonesia Expats Ben and Blair Ripple left their organic farming jobs in Washington and moved to Bali, Indonesia, in the late 90s. Since then, they’ve been become somewhat famous in their efforts to bring artisinal Indonesian products to a larger market and to establish and…
Wondering how to cook goat? Here’s a braised goat recipe for a shoulder chop, or any cut suitable for braising. It’s a lovely meat that tastes much like beef, yet raising goats can take fewer resources than raising cattle.
Working with and within nature using perennial food crops and restoration agriculture. Mark Shepard has created something of an environmental oasis at his Wisconsin homestead, New Forest Farm. Shepard, a farmer and author, is a longtime proponent of restoration agriculture, the practice of recreating healthy, naturally occurring, economically viable perennial farms. Packed with biodiversity, these…
What would it take to create food security for an entire community? This was the question that Pam Warhurst and Mary Clear sought to answer when conceiving ways in which they could make their hometown of Todmorden in Yorkshire, a self sustaining township. Their goals were big—to transform a wasteful and disconnected food culture into…
The health benefits of turmeric juice are many, it really is a superfood, even if it looks like an orange mummy finger. If you’ve not tried it already, here is another jamu recipe that will also give you a solid helping of greens. Feel free to substitute other greens or herbs. It’s been unseasonably hot…