There's just something about summertime that begs for food to be prepared on a grill. This summer, while grilling out, keep the environment in mind and make your barbeque a little greener:

• Often barbeques focus on the meat. But, when it comes to thinking green, meat production has a big impact on the environment. So, reduce the overall amount of meat you serve and make sure whatever meat you do grill was local, organic, and humanely-raised.
• Visit your farmer's market and buy some locally-grown organic veggies. Peppers, onions, zucchini, and summer squash are delicious when grilled. You can cut thick wedges, lightly brush them with olive oil, and grill. Or, skewer chunks of veggies and grill them like that. Corn is also great on the grill, but avoid the butter because it can really crank up the calories.
• Dice potatoes and grill them in a foil packet. You can also grill potatoes whole -- try a Yukon Gold sliced open and sprinkled with olive oil and rosemary. Thick wedges of sweet potato are also delicious on the grill.
• Serve a mixed greens salad topped with strawberries (all purchased from the farmer's market, of course).
  
• You can even grill fruit for dessert.
  

Your healthy -- and green -- feast is sure to be a hit with friends and family. Enjoy!

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Are you trying to live a greener lifestyle? Looking at your diet is a good place to start. Pesticides, food miles, and factory farms are three important issues when we talk about the environment, as are artificial additives, food diversity, and vegetarianism.

The Daily Green has an excellent 30-day guide to greening up your diet. For instance, you could eat one meal a week that comes 100% from local sources. You could buy organic fruits and vegetables, instead of the conventionally grown versions. You could shop at a farmer's market or CSA, find a source of compassionately grown meat, or even make meatless meals twice a week. Finally, you can read books on the subject like Michael Pollen's In Defense of Food and Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food.

Check out the rest of their suggestions and start eating a greener diet today.

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There are lots of good reasons to eat organic--your health and the health of your family being the most important one. But there are also a few good reasons to not eat organic--it's expensive, it can be difficult to find, and when you do find organic products, the choices are sometimes limited compared to the non-organic brands.

Myself, I eat organic about 65% of the time. I live in a big city and it's not difficult to find organic choices, but cost is sometimes a factor, so I stick to buying organic for the important items--the fruits and veggies, the meats and some of the dairy products.

But I'm curious -- what about you?

Organic diets are my favorite: there's a lack of nutritionally-deplete vegetables, natural tastes without the need for chemicals and ready availability. Is this the diet that was intended for the human body? How about calling an organic diet "God's Diet?"

100 years ago, there weren't food factories. Or preservatives. Or additives. Or mass manufacturing. All those combined with the need for profit gave rise to the processed food industry that most of American nibbles on every day.

Jim and Judi Mahaney readily call organic foods "God's Diet." The couple reviews food labels looking for chemical names they cannot pronounce, among other things. Judi says that she shops "for all the things that God made for us to eat, not the man-made things that companies have created for us. It's the food that God created -- the berries, fruits, and nuts, the plants and all the vegetables and herbs, and certain animals and fish."

Regardless of a belief in a higher power, what's your reason for consuming a natural and organic diet?

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I've never understood how food companies can get away with using the term "all natural" on any processed food that contains so many unnatural ingredients and preservative chemicals. But they do, although there is a constant fight from natural food advocates who chide companies like Kraft and General Mills every single day.

What is the definition of the word "natural" when used on any food product? There is none. You see, the commercial food industry is so lax on any standard that anything can be called, well, anything. Prescription drug products (and OTC drug products) are heavily regulated when it comes to labeling -- why not food products?

Most likely, because cost customers would would have a fit if they knew what they were really eating when consuming that white bread and packaged spray cheese. Nothing is "all natural" unless it was picked from the ground or cut from an animal that had no hormones, chemicals or other substances as part of a product. Unfortunately, almost 100% of the normal American diet does not conform to anything near the literal meaning of "all natural."

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In a recent conversation, I was disagreeing with someone about the quality of organic product you can find at many health food stores, and increasingly, at normal grocery stores.

Are these products really that much better? In a nutshell, yes. For one, toxic pesticide residue is generally not going to be found on organic produce. Secondly, there has been no genetic modification to the fruit as well -- ever wonder why those 'grocery store' strawberries or oranges are so friggin' large? No thanks. And, I won't even tough the irradiation that most conventional fruits and vegetables go through.

But the most important is nutrient content. It's hard to believe that the same millions of oranges and apples still contain plentiful nutrients from the soil they are grown in when that soil was used up long ago. Visit a fruit farm or volume vegetable farm and ask for a soil sample from the field. You'll be amazed at what is in there (and actually, what is not).

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Of course there will always be a market for convenient packaging and processed foods, but thankfully it seems that food trends are moving more towards natural foods that people prepare themselves in more natural ways. Cooking Light has put together a list of 5 of the healthier food trends we're seeing:

• Flexitarianism
• Locally grown foods
• Functional foods
• Organic foods
  
• Slow foods

If you want more information on any of those (I, for one, had to read what they meant by "functional foods") then see the complete article on CNN.com. Which ones are you already on board with? Are you bucking the trends or happy to be part of them?


Via Slashfood

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Organic has finally gone mainstream and more than ever, shoppers are using their food dollars to support sustainable living. Over at Slashfood, Marisa recently pointed us to a terrific quiz from The Green Guide about choosing organic foods. Making the best organic food choices doesn't always mean just shopping at Whole Foods or reading the claims on the front of the packages. If you really want to test your knowledge and see how much you know about organic foods, go take the quiz. You'll learn why organic peaches are a better use of your food dollars than organic bananas, and why you should extend your local eating habits past the growing season. How did you do?

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Although many of us eat organic fruits and veggies to get away from pesticides and herbicides that may have left residue on that tasty mango or tomato, did you know that there are more reasons to buy and eat organic?

The nutrient content of many farms (if they can be called that) was depleted long ago and there are an abundance of normal, everyday grocery store fruits and vegetables that simply taste great, but have little to no nutrients to offer. Remember, if the soil in which things are grown is depleted of nutrients, the things growing in that soil will be devoid of nutrients as well.

How about organically grown tomatoes? Recent research that compared conventional and organic foods found that there was a much larger amount of flavonoids in organic tomatoes than in conventional tomatoes. Sounds about right to me. Is organic worth the price premium? It is from my corner.

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Besides improving the nutrition of my and my family's meals, one of my main goals right now is to make those meals as "clean" as possible. Clean foods are those that are grown organically and in a sustainable manner, whether they be fruits and vegetables, fish, or coffee. To reach our goal of a "cleaner plate," we joined a food co-op a little over a year ago, will be regulars at our local farmer's market this summer, and planted our own (tiny) vegetable garden this year so that we can freeze veggies to use during the cold winter months. I've been working to tackle one product at a time to make sure that the foods we eat most frequently come from sources I can feel good about. While we aren't there yet, I've seen a vast improvement in the quality and variety of the food we're eating, and my kids are eating things they would have never touched just a few months ago.

If you're interested in a cleaner plate, here's an excellent slide show for the beginner. It covers basic information such as what exactly "organic" means and how to properly read labels, genetically-modified foods, ocean-safe fish, and how to reduce the amount of packaging in the food you buy. When we were getting started, it was overwhelming, but if you choose just one thing to work on at a time, you'll be well on your way to cleaning up your own plate in no time!

I've linked to The Cleaner Plate Club before, but if you're looking to eat in a more eco-friendly way, Ali's got it all: tons of research, well-written posts, and recipes to boot. Check her out!

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I've been paying attention to the proliferation of new and "Organic" food offerings at mass merchandisers like Wal-Mart and Target from last year into this year and have a few questions. Maybe a reader can shed some light here?

There are hundreds of smaller Organic food companies that most likely can't increase production to meet the demand scheduled from mass merchants, which leave larger Organic outfits like Muir Glen and The Hain Celestial Group to fill in Wal-Mart's Organic food offerings.

I've noticed "Organic Raisin Bran" as well now, so the question that comes to mind is: are the large manufacturers just marketing the term "Organic" without any Organic certification or other measurement, just to stoke the public's growing attention on eating more nutritionally-dense foods?

It's hard to say right now, but when I start to see the term "Organic" on Frito-Lay tortilla chips, Chee-tos and mainstream breakfast cereals, inquiring minds want to know what's behind the curtain.

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When the world's largest processed food maker has rising sales based on healthy products, changes are sure to come. It makes sense -- high-growth areas are always being scrutinized for growth potential, and as more and more folks choose healthy foods and reject processed and junk foods, manufacturers will easily notice.

As always my concern, though, is what happens to quality when large companies get into the "health food" business, as I've seen countless tries that end up devaluing what health food is. Adding "whole grain wheat" to a product does not make it instantly healthy.

Are we to see more and more healthy food offerings from Nestle soon? I'll be keeping my eyes open on this one for sure. Is Nestle gets into the organic foods game, they will be under very watchful eyes.

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My kids have a thing for mangoes, more like an obsession really. They can eat them faster than I can peel them, and "mango" was one of my younger child's first words. Here's the thing, though -- mangoes don't grow where I live...ever, which means that to get a mango it must be driven or flown here from somewhere else.

When our family started eating more organic foods, it was mostly for the health of our children. Our kids go through an astonishing amount of produce for two small children and I was concerned about the levels of pesticides they were getting. But I try to be an eco-conscious consumer as well and can't help but hear the debate between eating food grown organically and food grown locally. This article talks about consumers who've been brought up to expect out of season fruit on their grocery store shelves, and I'm one of them. I'm used to eating strawberries and mangoes and starfruit, even in February. But this debate gives me pause and makes me wonder if I should be taking a harder look at my habits, especially when I read about how much air travel (even if it's only my mangoes doing the traveling) contributes to global warming.

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We all know they're out there, but they might be more mainstream than you think: fast food chains that provide natural and organic food choices are successfully sinking roots in practically every area of the United States. Organic To Go, on the west coast, is cashing in on the $14 billion organic industry by boasting 70% organic ingredients in its casual menu of sandwiches and salads. In the Midwest, the young burrito restaurant Chipotle serves hormone-free and sustainably raised pork and some of its beans are organic. And in the east, O'Naturals serves organic options like roast beef sandwiches, hummus, salad greens, and fruit smoothies to drink.

Of course these are just a few of the many restaurants across the country now offering healthier and more natural menus. The good news is that the more this trend grows the more pressure it puts on the "real" fast food chains -- word is McDonald's is offering organic coffee to its New England and New York customers.

Baby steps!

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One of the most respected rites of passage for college students these days is to go through hazing rituals that are demeaning and often, gross and lurid. Wait just a minute -- I'm just kidding here.

In what is an increasing phenomenon around The Culinary Institute of America in the New York area, college kids are making it a habit to eat fresh fruits and vegetables if attending -- or visiting -- the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York.

The Culinary Institute of America is going to local farmers for fresh, just-dug-up product to feed its students in part and to help save the agriculture industry in Hudson County, among other things.

This "giving back" to the farming community while simultaneously providing the best nutrition possible for college students is the mark of someone's exceeding vision if you ask me -- and I highly applaud it.

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