In Britain, the amount of yearly food waste can fill London’s Wembley Stadium.

Here’s something humiliating.

I’m a Brit. (That’s not the humiliating bit. Bear with me). We’re so careless with our groceries that we throw away around a third of them each year – at a total cost of $20 billion. Appalling, dreadful and…unreal. Yes, that’s the word. Look at that figure: $20 billion. Try to imagine it for a second, there in the room with you. Bet you can’t. I’ll bet even the Donald would struggle with it. It’s an abstraction that means nothing except to economists and…well, that’s about it.

What’s so may-the-ground-swallow-me-up humilating is this: the people of WRAP’s Love Food Hate Waste campaign just made that number real. In a number of events across the north of England over the last six months, they’ve  taken the amount of food the average British household tosses away in one year, cooked it up, and fed it to 1,000 hungry students. Of course, even students would draw the line at eating that banana I threw away in January, so this food was donated by regional food distribution charities like Food Aware and Real Aid, and the chosen menu focused on big, hearty dishes like vegetable curry and rhubarb crumble. Think Jamie’s School Dinners and you’d also bag the educational side of it – each event featured demonstrations on ways to turn limp leftovers into full-flavored feasts.

Back to $20 billion. How much food is that? Well, you can’t fit it into one room. In fact, you’ll need to fill London’s Wembley Stadium.

…8 times.

That’s a lot of food.

Images: Cushdy, mhaller1979.

There’s something simple about Saturday mornings. The weekly formula that includes tea, NPR and a ride downtown to go to farmers’ market. The weekly morning excursion is a shopping experience cut down to the basic essentials: run through the mental list of what I need, track down the stand that sells it, take one walk around the stands just to people watch, and then get back on my bike and ride home. There’s no list required. Just a hassle-free and low stress outing that not only ensures that I eat well for the next few days, but also happens to be one of my favorite parts of the week. Unlike trekking the the grocery store, farmers’ market outings never feel like a chore.

But why? Is it just the fact that I’m assured organic, local produce, handed to me by the farmer that grew it? That certainly plays a role. But when I take time to think about it, it’s because I’m not overwhelmed. I know what I want, and I know where to get it. And if I don’t know what I want, I’m subject to an onslaught of flashy, shiny marketing to get me to buy a product. Broccoli is broccoli, apples are apples, and goat cheese is straight up, 100 percent goat cheese. No preservatives, no additives, no fancy packaging, just plain old regular food.

Fortune recently published a story giving an in-depth look at one of the hottest food stores of our time: Trader Joe’s. We all know how popular this California-based grocer has become, in fact its rise to fame is fascinating, but how many of us take time to think about why we like it? One of the reasons is the same reason that I’m personally drawn to farmers’ market: simplicity.

Your average grocery store carries 50,000 items, while Trader Joe’s only has 4,000. To the untrained eye, that looks like limited selection – something that our Western brains have been trained to avoid. In our consumer culture, we’ve long been taught that bigger is better. But our brains know better. “People are worried they’ll regret the choice they made,” Barry Schwartz, a Swarthmore professor and author of The Paradox of Choice, is quoted in the article. “People don’t want to feel they made a mistake.” Turns out that people have actually been proven to enjoy purchases more when there are less options to choose from.

Which brings us back to the foodie movement: size does matter, and in a world of conscious gourmands, less is more. Shopping at big-box stores might sound appealing because no matter what we need, it’s probably there, but ultimately this initial appeal is an illusion. Numerous choices are a byproduct of a system run by cheap fossil fuels. Want 10 kinds of rice noodles imported from Southeast Asia? No problem! In the mood for ice cream? Make sure you’re ready to choose from the multitude of options, many of which have ingredients whose number practically exceeds the number of pints in the store freezer.

Food shopping in the form of farmers’ markets, CSAs and other smaller, localized operations may “limit” what we’re able to put on the dinner table – you won’t be cooking up winter squash in May – but we know what we’re getting is healthy and our brains are happy that we avoid launching into a never-ending path of dinner options, which in turn actually isn’t so limiting after all.

In fact, it’s liberating.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground. Each week, Anna will be taking a look at something new and different that’s taking place in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to culinary avant garde.

Image: iboy_daniel

Many moons ago I wrote about an eco-conscious baby product company by the name of ZoLi. Now that I have a little baby of my own I’ve had a chance to try out some of ZoLi’s products and promises, and let me tell you, they deliver.

Health-conscious parents will be happy to know that all ZoLi products are BPA and phthalate-free.  (No endocrine disruptors leaching out of the plastic and into your baby’s body.) And their philosophy extends to their recycled paper and soy ink packaging.

But beyond all that, ZoLi’s products are just plain good.

The Baby Ohm ($20, above) is a light, portable, easy-to-clean diaper-changing mat that’s like a little yoga mat for baby. It’s more attractive than any of the other diaper mats I’ve seen and best of all there’s no off-gassing plastic smell to make diaper changing any stinkier than it needs to be.

For teething babies, the Munch teether ($5) is just lovely. The soft, textured silicone seems so much more pleasant to chew on than hard plastic, and it’s non-toxic (free of nitrosamine and PVC).

Parents looking for safe plastic bottles, ZoLi’s BPA and phthalate-free bottles and silicone anti-colic nipples are just what you need. And although my baby is many months away from eating solid foods, I’ve already used the pretty colored stackable snack dispenser ($15) to stow away nuts, sliced strawberries and other little snacks for myself.

Three cheers to ZoLi, a company created by eco-conscious parents, making our world a better place for babies, one product at a time.

Fruit and vegetables are under a lot of pressure these days. It’s not just about taste, or how and where they’re grown – they have to be glamorous as well.

Late last year, I was horrified to find that the European Union was scrapping laws on the precise measurements of 26 types of fruit and vegetable. What horrified me was that there were laws to scrap. It seems that years ago, strict guidelines were laid down prohibiting the sale of foodstuffs that don’t reflect a standardized shape – as if Nature should conform to some edible version of the International System Of Units. A banana like a question mark? Offensive and vile. A carrot with an extra leg? My eyes, my eyes! And so on.

If these foodstuffs didn’t measure up – they were officially deemed unfit for sale. This amounted to an estimated 20% of the British harvest that couldn’t be sold (as if it didn’t have enough problems already), driving food prices even higher. No sale? It gets thrown away (oh good, we are pleased). Outcry? You bet – from producers and customers alike, after fiascoes like retailer J Sainsbury being told it couldn’t sell forked carrots relabeled as “witch’s fingers” for Halloween. Sorry, kiddies, off you pop – Europe has spoken.

So this ludicrous system is being ditched on July 1st, and good riddance. But is this worrying trend going to go away? Are we going to start obsessing over how our food looks before it’s cooked? It’s a fact that science is learning the genetic mechanisms that determine food-shape; at the moment, tomatoes are under the spotlight. We could be years away from the commercial version of beauty contests – but for now, from July 1st, I’ll be aiming for the wonkiest, lumpiest fruit and vegetables I can find. No matter what Eurocrats might think, they’re the real shape of things to come.

Image: Brettf

When Guayaki stepped up and claimed that they are now offering the world’s first Fair Trade Certified yerba mate’, I thought “Really? Are they really the first?” With so many mate’ brands out there, I thought surely there must be others. But after Googling around a bit, it seems that yes, indeed, Guayaki is it.

Your first question perhaps: What is yerba mate? It’s Argentina’s national tea and comes from a shrub, actually a relative of holly, that grows in subtropical South America. Yerba Mate and Argentina’s social culture are tightly intertwined – you’ll almost never see a group hanging around without simultaneously passing around a gourd.

And your second question: What is Fair Trade? It’s a global certification which ensures that all the workers (the South American mate’ farmers, for example) are treated humanely and paid a living wage. It also ensures there’s no child labor and no toxic chemical exposure for the workers involved. Fair Trade Certification is a positive way to make sure that everybody involved in a business wins.

Images: Guayaki.

There’s green action. Then there’s green soul. You can change your light bulbs, recycle and buy organic. Or you can choose to be green – living with consciousness and integrity – deep in your very core.

The book Most Good, Least Harm explores this difference, which the author, Zoe Weil, dubs MOGO. She urges readers to investigate their actions and impact in order to live and create a life that works for the highest good. In her own words:

This is not a how-to book with prescribed choices for doing the most good and least harm. It is, instead, a call to define for yourself your deepest values and to live accordingly.

But the author also takes into account the conflicts this can cause. For example, she used a computer to write her book and educate about MOGO, but is aware of the toxic chemicals used in computer production. She promotes critical thinking for all of us to address these challenges in our everyday lives and, after analyzing the situation, work for the highest good.

The seven keys to MOGO are:
Live your Epitaph
Pursue Joy through Service
Make Connections and Self-Reflect
Model Your Message and Work for Change
Find and Create Community
Take Responsibility
Strive for Balance

For those who could use some down-to-earth guidance beyond the rhetoric, a helpful questionnaire and action plan is included, plus pages of detailed information and a list of online resources to help you on your way.

Living your epitaph – it puts things in a diffferent perspective, doesn’t it? Clearly, creating a life of the highest integrity requires a great deal of introspection and the changes required can seem intimidating. But the author is not asking for overnight change; rather, she seeks to inspire us to think and act from a higher place and make the changes we feel we need to make, at our own pace and one at a time. MOGO is a process, and it’s one we urgently need.

Author Zoe Weil

Blake Mycoskie, founder of Tom’s shoes in Venice, CA, and a former contestant on The Amazing Race, gives away a pair of shoes for every pair his company sells. He’s now donated over 115,000 pairs through a series of Shoe-Drop tours around the world.

Why?

To give children the opportunity to wear shoes through his One For One program of course, but also because an explosive trend in conscious consumerism is upon us. We want to know who we’re buying from, the size of their carbon footprint and yes, if the people who made it were paid a reasonable amount to do the work.

Giving product and money to causes is part of the new distribution of designer wealth and it’s what’s we want to see. Designers big and small see the benefits of this.

EDUN founders, Bono of U2 and Ali Hewson founded their company in 2005 featuring organic clothing, graphic tees and eco-clothing with a mission to drive sustainable employment in developing economies.

Other designers like Betsey Johnson, Iman, Tory Burch and Nicole Miller have done everything from support the environment to donate to AIDS awareness, breast cancer research and school nutrition programs.

Maybe they do it because they realize how good it feels to give.

Maybe they do it because the numbers add up better if they do it, but maybe, just maybe they do it so that when their kids ask them in ten years: “Mommy, what did you do to help the world?”

Mommy can then look them straight in the eye and say, “A lot.”

Image: Garry Knight

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