the greener side

Sustainable sweets

At Paris CDG airport a few years ago, I made my only splurge in France other than a big, fluffy white sweater: a stack of tins of Anis de Flavigny in every flavor. These old-school candies are fashioned in a sustainable way. I imagine Marie Antionette popping these during a long soak in the bathtub (OK, that’s not a sustainable image, and forgive the insufferable “when I was in Europe” start to this post. Zzz.).

Records show that the treats were given to travelers in 1591, but they may have been around for centuries longer. Here’s what I could translate from their sweet site: The staff of 25 works out of the precious-looking village of Flavigny, in an abbey built in 718. They get anise seeds from Spain, Turkey and Syria, and then roll them around and around in sugar snowballing for about 15 days until forming one-gram pastille confections. They use real sugar instead of skimping with cheap-o corn syrup like most soda pop makers do. The mouth-watering Candy Blog paid tribute recently:

The pastille was often the work of a pharmacist or herbalist, not a confectioner. They started with seeds or herbs that were prescribed for various reasons (fever, digestion, impotence)… The most talented pharmacists made beautiful pastilles that looked like shimmering opalescent spheres and were kept as if they were treasures as well, inside ornate boxes, often locked by the lady of the household.

Well-crafted candy can be medicinal, a work of art. Mais quelle horreur! Much of the postmodern world has lost its taste for artisanal, all-natural confections. Look how the FDA may try to pass off cocoa butter as true chocolate (hurry up and petition the government by April 25!). Sustainable sweet stuff is important in light of the obesity epidemic. For instance, former President Clinton chose to focus his speech before a crowd of educators in San Francisco this week on how the ever-growing heft of American children could collapse our healthcare system in the coming decades. So go ahead, be a food snob.

I’ll continue to budget as much as several dollars a day for real, dark chocolate, 65 percent and up, and I’ll down anything with a floral scent. When traveling through Paris, Venice and Rome back in the day, I scarfed my way through cone after cup after petite cone of ice cream and gelato in violet, lavender and rose flavors. Not a bad budget diet at $2 a pop. (Starving? Let them eat cake cones!) And one of my favorite all-time meals was a lavender-flavored pasta dish around quirky Bolinas, California.

Don’t crinkle your nose; these flavors are really no more radical than rosemary or peppermint. You can grow them in your windowsill and toss them into stir fries and stews. And hooray, floral herbs are surfacing more lately in mainstream American cooking.

Wash those breasts right in through your hair

You buy organic milk and eat Ben & Jerry's ice cream because it's free of hormones, which can throw your body out of whack in mysterious ways. But what are you rubbing into your scalp? Many shampoos and conditioners--especially those marketed to smooth the hair of black women--are packed with synthetic hormones, which your body easily sucks in through the skin. How about organic brands instead? In test tubes, even lavender oil mimics estrogen.

A debate is raging about why nearly half of black girls and 15 percent of white girls seem to be starting puberty by age 8. (I couldn't find any way around the P word, yech.) Some toddler girls and boys even develop breasts, suffering what the NYT highlights as "preschool puberty." Could it be mom's shampoo--Super Gro being so aptly named? Or plastics, with hormone-disrupting phthalates rubbing into our mucous membranes through pacifiers and sex toys? What about the omnipresent industrial chemicals that monkey with our endocrine systems and so much more? It's been seven years since the government was supposed to take a hard look at how such ingredients mess with the environment and our bodies.

Scientists don't even know enough about how hormones work to endorse them after menopause, or to warn women about a breast cancer link. But the FDA lets drugstore bodycare products contain just as many artifical female hormones as grandmother might swallow in her daily change-of-life horse pills.

The estrogen compounds in the urine of millions get flushed into our groundwater, streams and oceans, probably rendering frogs and other delicate creatures infertile. Yet gynecologists regularly push birth control pills on tweens. Women even take the pill year-round so they'll never have to have a period; a new drug will make that even easier. What to do? Stuntmother puts the lack of an answer better than I can:

Problem is, there's something worrying every time I swing my head around. Water has lead. Shampoo has lavender. Food has growth hormones or has been genetically modified. Our vegetables are sprayed. Our playgrounds have glass in the grass and needles on the swings. Our cars are spewing out carcinogens, as are our factories and air conditioners. Our crackers have preservatives and polyunsaturated grease. Fish is riddled with mercury. George Bush is president. Perverts lurk on the internet and reality television is weird. North Korea has nuclear bombs and the Gulf Stream is slowing. Oil is over sixty dollars a barrel and clothing is sweat-shopped. Children are dying in mines and orphanages and pressure treated wood has arsenic. New paint and carpets off-gas and old carpets have dust mites and old paint has lead. People still think that Paris Hilton is pretty and the authorities (ha!) can't decide whether 10,000 or 600,000 Iraqis have died since we charged into Iraq.

There are dangers everywhere and a thousand more I do not know or that have not yet been discovered. I cannot be a one woman shield against all that is poisoning, threatening, lurking and destroying my children. I want to be -- but I can't. So where is the line?

Stop squeezing those peaches

Soon a sticker on your fruit may tell you that that peach is ready for a juicy bite or that, yes, you have ripe bananas--and it won't be that little old Chiquita sticker telling you so. Within a few years, new RediRipe stickers might start showing up on supermarket fruits, turning blue to indicate ripeness. An Arizona professor invented the stickers to detect levels of ethylene gas given off by peaches, apples, pears, avocados, bananas, as well as other fruits, veggies and flowers when they reach their potential.

Ethylene acts like a hormone in plants, by the way. It makes me wonder if we'll ever get a sticker to light up when our milk, cheese, and ice cream is laced with artifical hormones? That sticker would have to turn from a pure white to a putrid, green-beige pus color. How about a little gold star sticker to light up a shocking chartreuse hue when there's radiation in our backyards? I also wouldn't mind a sticker to glow black to show when we're breathing pesticides outdoors or formaledyde indoors.

Chocolate: do it raw

Our obsessive Valentine's-era efforts to rate some of the world's finest organic, dark chocolates barely hinted at cacao's sweetness and power. If you're truly cuckoo about getting a health kick from cocoa, then cut the sugar and go raw.

Gregory mentioned that Stacey was glowing brighter than a firefly since she'd added a bliss-inducing cacao concoction to her daily food regime, so I plotted to share her snack for the sake of fellow felinekind (the benefits seem to be extra potent for women thanks to magnesium and more). Voila: Stacey and Five Point Wellness released this secret recipe that will balance your body and help manifest more dreams than a fortune cookie. Scoop up some cacao in bulk and fill up a tall, dark, handsome jar with this heady mixture to keep on your countertop:

1 handful raw cacao nibs
20 goji berries
1 T pumpkin seeds
1 T coconut flakes
3 coarsely chopped brazil nuts
dash of celtic or Himalayan sea salt

You could drizzle on some agave nectar if your sweet tooth feels bitter. Keep reading for cacao smoothie secrets (thanks, Stacey!)...

Does microwaved water kill plants?

Do microwaves poison food? One Marshall Dudley posted the results of what was supposedly a granddaughter's science project, in which the kid watered two plants (geraniums? the leaves on the clippings look different from the plantings). One sprout sipped microwaved water while the other got stove-boiled water--after it chilled, I assume. It's not a double-blind study, peer-reviewed in Nature. Yet one glance at the results are enough to make any microwave-wary folks gulp. Dudley followed up:

We have seen a number of comments on this, such as what was the water in the microwave boiled in. The thinking is that maybe some leaching took place if it was in plastic.  It was boiled in a plastic cup, so this could be a possibility.

Yeah, everyone says that plastic is safe, and microwaves don't cause cancer (although popcorn bags definitely leach teflon into your munchies). But does nuking food and water make it less healthy for living things, if not deadly? Was this a case of radiation sickness or plastic poisoning, was this test too sloppy to tell, or is it a hoax?

technorati tags: radiation environment health microwave

You'll be thirsty

This poor page has been neglected most of the week, and may be neglected for another week while I travel as far east as I've ever been. In the meantime, click over to some of the zillions of great green blogs listed here, left and right. And Happy (?) World Water Day. Lucky ducks might enjoy more cash flow  if they invest in water stocks. Meanwhile a billion people and rising lack clean H20. Read this and weep for our oceans, too. There are some happy new stories here.

Fighting disease with citrus power

Why would UC Berkeley students wear lime juice-soaked tampons for two weeks? Are people that eccentric on the left coast, or is DIY douching in vogue? Neither, or both--but really--those Cal coeds were part of a test trying to find whether citrus power might safely fight HIV. Women account for 60 percent of the world's new HIV cases. If you grew up far from Berkeley, in a place where your father sold you for cows, chances are that you lack the security or health knowledge to make a man wear a condom. Could a dash of lime-based microbicide become a low-tech secret weapon for such women? That's what Berkeley public health researcher Anke Hemmerling hopes. For two decades, health educators and advertisers pushed lubricants containing HIV-killer nonoxynol-9 until realizing that the chemical instead made it easier for women to get the virus. As the East Bay Express explains:

Natural microbicides extracted from fruit or other plants could be a particularly elegant way around the pharmaceutical industry. It's not such a weird idea -- for centuries, women have whipped up homemade contraceptives and microbicides from things like lime or lemon juice, vinegar, honey, and olive oil. With a pH of 2.2, lime juice is sufficiently acidic to kill most microbes, and can neutralize HIV in a test tube in less than a minute...There may be other natural options -- the second-best HIV killer is pomegranate juice -- and the active substance in Carraguard, one of the lead pharmaceutical microbicides being tested, is carrageenan, which is derived from seaweed.

Acidic citrus fruits and seaweed make some strong cleaning products, too. Although limes may eat away at condoms, early tests with willing human guinea pigs show that the tart fruit isn't too harsh for women's bodies. Maybe green microbicides will be a mainstream sexual safeguard for when condoms aren't an option, but more tests are needed. Unfortunately, makers of phony HIV-slayers such as Green Sun (and even spray on condoms), are scamming people into believing they can already get natural protection in a bottle.

Sustainable finger food: maggots

Speaking of slow food, larvae are a truly sustainable source of protein, especially in parts of Africa. As E Magazine reports, lines form around the block for maggot ice cream, crunchy salad, and cocktails at one German restaurant. Stop gagging. Are maggots any more disgusting to eat than mammal meat from factory farms? Insects are hiding in our processed food anyway. The FDA says that 20 maggots per half can or so of mushrooms  won't hurt you. You're already eating insect larvae, so go ahead and use them for bite-size hors d'ouevres.

With organic food at Wal-Mart and local and slow food so chic these days, bugs are the final frontier for green-minded eaters. All it would take is for some eco-conscious stars to fawn over maggots from the red carpet. Maybe I'm dreaming, since there's no larvae lobby willing to sponsor Naomi Watts and her pals. Back to the original thought, E describes how Swiss nonprofit CABI Bioscience and the World Agroforestry Center are working to "promote edible insect larvae as an answer both to food scarcity and the destruction of African forests." Even maggots must be harvested sustainably. Maybe that Dresden, Germany restaurant could cut down on pollluting air travel  involved in importing their maggots from Mexico, and find a closer source?

Life by chocolate: an organic Valentine's countdown

Dark chocolate is the new red wine. It often leads to sex, plus it's loaded with antioxidants that keep you kicking. Sadly, unless you shop carefully, you might get cocoa that's picked by child slaves or full of pesticides.

Happily, gourmet chocolates with a conscience are getting easier to find; even Hershey's and  Cadbury are finally getting in on the game. I try to support the smaller brands, whose expertise in crafting shade-grown, slave-free, organic chocolates is in high demand lately.

So where do you find the best guilt-free-but-sinful stuff? Over these next two weeks leading to V-Day, I'll be tasting and rating some of the world's greatest organic, fair trade, sexual chocolates. In the end, I'll pick a favorite and make an obsessive comparison chart.

But first, please be aware of such hardship: I bought a stack of rich, dark chocolate bars (above) at a local organic food co-op this weekend. But after I innocently snapped a picture of the rack of chocolates for this blog, a store employee demanded that I erase the photo. Despite feeling humiliated after spending $80 on chocolate, I played nice, but it was tricky to erase the picture because my camera is set to Spanish. This woman took the camera from me and also fumbled, but her friend finally did the deed. What, did she think I was going to steal corporate secrets from the co-op? As if Whole Foods doesn't already know what they've been up to for decades.

"I'm sorry, but don't you think that's going a little too far?" I asked employee #1. "It's okay," she said, as if I were apologizing.

Instead of getting good PR in the blogosphere for its stock of chocolates, our vegetarian, employee-run, San Francisco grocery store shall remain unnamed. When I got to the car and described the ordeal to Miguel, he walked up to their window and took this forbidden, Weegee-style shot.

Coming next: chocolate test results, day #1.

Kenaf for victory

Check out DoCoMo's new biodegradable cell phone, the Foma N701ECO--€”too bad you can't buy it in the U.S. yet (via Gizmodo). It's made of bioplastic based on *corn and* Kenaf, an Asian wonder plant that can shoot up to 14 feet tall with little care in mere months.

Like hemp, Kenaf has lots of industrial potential, but without the stigma.
To the uninformed, the flowering plant's leaves look similar to those of cannabis, which has gotten kenaf uprooted occasionally by the DEA. Kenaf can be used as an alternative to wood pulp papers, and in animal feed, carpeting, clothing, roofing, fire logs, packaging, wallpaper, and in place of fiberglass.  Toyota's electric one-person electric bioplastic car (left), the i-unit, uses kenaf as a composite. NEC wants to incorporate kenaf into its gadgets, which the company intends to make with 10 percent bioplastics by 2010.

The USDA has been researching kenaf since 1956. It's being grown in the deep south and California. If its use becomes more popular, the plant has great potential for farmers here and in the developing world. For example, a new kenaf paper mill is expected to bring 30,000 jobs to rural Vietnam by 2007.