I have 4 tips to make your kitchen greener, and you'll be happy to know they all respect the other green category – money.
1) Eat greener. The lower you eat on the food chain, the better it is for the environment. It simply takes more land / energy / water to grow a pound of beef than it does to grow a pound of broccoli or eggplant.
2) Recycle those table scraps, so you can turn them into compost. Get a small container with a lid, maybe even an old diaper pail, and keep all that old plant matter left over from preparing and eating a meal. No animal products. Just veggie scraps. Phase two happens out in the yard when you turn the table scraps into plant food by making compost.
3) Use non-toxic cleaning products. Your food sat on that counter, for God's sake. AND, vinegar and water and baking soda are much cheaper than the harsh chemical alternatives.
4) Avoid single use plastic whenever possible. Store your leftovers in re-useable containers that last for many years and save some dough. Plastic bags cost a lot over time.
Certain issues are very near and dear to my heart and none more so than hunger. Having worked in a homeless shelter, I got to know people who struggled to get enough to eat on a daily basis and it was an honor to be able to feed them. Ironically the homeless shelter I worked at was in a very wealthy county. But hunger is something that the richest and the poorest countries have in common and it doesn't just affect the homeless. And it will take public effort to make the changes necessary to see that hunger is wiped out.
Checks and balances. Have you ever thought about how amazing those
two words are? In the simplest sense, writing checks and figuring out
how much money you have left after you’ve written them. In the larger
sense, if something is depleted or out of whack, something comes along
to reestablish order.
After allowing my 13 year old daughter Hannah to sit on the couch
all summer and watch TV, while surfing the net for days on end, my
guilt that nothing worthwhile was filling that pretty little head of
hers was mounting. I started looking for things to do in this
wonderful town of ours. I definitely wanted to go to the Lautner
exhibit at the Armand Hammer Museum and Hannah saw a picture of one of
his houses and was actually interested too, but then I saw something on
Daily Candy talking about an event at the Santa Monica Library and
thought “Aha! This’ll be the thing I do. This’ll be the antidote to all
those episodes of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. I was going to take
Hannah to a symposium on Food and Climate Change.”
Here are four things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint in 2008.