Category Archives: issues

Wetland Mitigation: That Swamp Land Is Worth Something

Posted on January 23, 2012 by | 5 Comments

A wetland is classified as any low-lying land that is flooded for at least a portion of a calendar year.  Swamps, bogs, marshes and fens all fall into this category.   An acre of wetland can store up to 1 to 1.5 million gallons of water.  Enviro Girl thinks that’s astonishing–if we would just leave wetlands alone, we’d have no need for retention ponds in most cases.  Wetlands also filter and purify water flowing into streams, lakes, rivers and oceans and they provide habitat for an amazing array of creature and plant life–everything from reptiles to insects, fungi to ferns.  Without wetlands, water sources would be more polluted and flooding becomes a problem.  In short, wetlands provide many services and resources, but they’re under-appreciated. Continue reading →

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Ringing in the New Year With One Easy Eco-Resolution

Posted on January 2, 2012 by | 112 Comments

Everyone starts a new year with plans to improve–lose weight, save money, take a risk, accomplish a goal.  Enviro Girl thinks everyone should start the new year with an Eco-resolution, one small thing they can do to improve the environment.  The small things add up, as illustrated in this recent post over at Fake Plastic Fish.  Here are some free, incredibly convenient and easy Eco-resolutions for you and your friends to try:

Continue reading →

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Posted in 3 Rs, fast facts, green around the world, issues, living green on a budget

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Shop Local: Do It for Yourself & for Your Community

Posted on November 30, 2011 by | 2 Comments

Enviro Girl is a HUGE fan of shopping at locally owned and operated businesses.  From restaurants to florists to film developers to groceries, if it’s owned by Mom and Pop, you’ll find her spending her money there.  In fact, she goes out of her way to avoid shopping at “Big Box” and franchise stores.  She’ll go years without shopping at the local mall and tries her very best to spend her money at the stores on “Main Street.”  Her reasons are environmental, political  and economical — here’s the breakdown of why she shops local: Continue reading →

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Posted in eco holidays, issues, transportation, websites & blogs

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Buy Nothing Day: Celebrate it with us!

Posted on November 21, 2011 by | 6 Comments

Nothing, not even a week in Italy with George Clooney, could induce Enviro Girl to go shopping on Black Friday.  The last predictions she read indicated 77 million people planned to shop that day, mostly with plans to buy stuff for themselves.  Consumption and consumerism has shaded most people’s Christmas season.  There’s no escaping the message from the advertisements:  buying stuff will make us all happier.   The reality is that going on a spending frenzy at the mall has absolutely zilch to do with joy or peace on earth.

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Posted in 3 Rs, eco holidays, green around the world, issues, living green on a budget, websites & blogs

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Reducing Food Waste

Posted on October 10, 2011 by | 4 Comments

Coming Soon:  October 16 is Blog Action Day, and this year’s topic is FOOD!  What a great topic!  On that day, bloggers will cover topics including sustainable food production, the availability of food, the cost of food, creative ways to serve food, malnutrition, hunger, becoming vegetarian and favorite foods.  As an omnivore, Enviro Girl can’t wait for October 16th!

Speaking of food, Enviro Girl read an interesting piece the other day:  How That Food You Throw Out Is Linked to Global Warming.  Wasting food resources has significant environmental impact, but people often don’t think about it.  The energy spent on food production and transportation could be reduced if we reduced the 55 million tons of food we throw away.  Enviro Girl has read other staggering statistics on food waste–and she’s been guilty of throwing away food at her house too.  It’s a common thing to find gross stuff in refrigerators, but tossing out a bag of food each month is a waste of money and many other resources as the article explains.

Waste aside, Enviro Girl began really examining her family’s shopping and food consumption habits about two years ago.  It bugged her to literally throw out money from her fridge every month.  How could she fix this problem?  Here are three of the things she did to reduce her family’s food waste:

1.  Meal planning.  Instead of randomly shopping for food each week, Enviro Girl started writing a list of what she planned to make for meals ahead of her weekly trip to the grocery store.  AFTER taking inventory of the necessary ingredients, Enviro Girl would shop for what she needed.  By planning meals a week in advance, Enviro Girl saved time, money and threw out less wasted food.  This also resulted in less stress–instead of asking “what’s for dinner?” at 5:00 each evening, her family knew chicken casserole was on the menu and every part of the meal was assembled beforehand for fast preparation without any missing ingredients causing delays.

2.  Eating down the pantry.  Once every few months Enviro Girl skips her weekly shopping trip and makes meals out of what she finds in her pantry, fridge and freezer.  This forces her family to eat the frozen half of a lasagna they’ve saved before it succumbs to freezer burn.  This keeps Enviro Girl from stockpiling ingredients for meals she didn’t get around to making.  By managing her family’s resources by hoarding almost no food, Enviro Girl never throws out bottles of ketchup that expired in 1998 or cans of soup that should’ve been sold in 2002.*

3.  Buying less.  Sure, there are 5 people in Enviro Girl’s family, but that doesn’t mean she needs to buy 5 pears or 5 oranges.  (She’s not sure why she kept doing this for so long, but one way she figured out her family’s consumption habits was by buying less to see what they actually ran short of and what they never really ate.)  Enviro Girl began buying less perishable food more often.  This meant the food she bought actually got eaten before it became rotten and turned to mush in her produce drawer.  Buying less perishable food means throwing out less rotten food.

*  Bonus tip:  Every time there’s a food drive, Enviro Girl donates every unopened can/box/jar of food she can find in her pantry.  This insures that nothing remains beyond its expiration date and when there’s less clutter, Enviro Girl can take better inventory of what her family really needs.

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Posted in 3 Rs, food, issues, living green on a budget

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Quiet Down: A Few Tips on Controlling Noise Pollution

Posted on September 26, 2011 by | 4 Comments

Years ago Enviro Girl lived in town and on a hot spring evening she was trying to grade a stack of papers for her English students.  She had the windows open to catch the breeze.  She was also catching the boisterous noise of a house party a few doors down the street.  The stereo blasted, kids shouted and try as she might, Enviro Girl could not concentrate.  It was 10 on a week night and Enviro Girl felt like she should have to right to keep her windows open and work in relative quiet.  After another half hour of sputtering her irritation, she called the local police department to inquire about a city noise ordinance.  The dispatcher assured her that the noise ordinance was in effect for over an hour now, so Enviro Girl filed a complaint about the party.  About fifteen minutes later the police busted an underage beer party and Enviro Girl was able to finish grading her papers in relative peace and quiet.

Noise pollution–it’s everywhere, wrecking the quality of life.  The effects range from  irreparable hearing loss to increased stress levels and disrupted sleep patterns.  Noise pollution causes environmental damage as well.  In the ocean, many dolphins and whales cannot communicate with each other because of all the racket from ships and sonar blasts.  Noise pollution in our seas creates havoc for migrating fish and is considered to be a major cause of beached whales.  Frogs, birds, insects and bats cannot compete with noise pollution, resulting in depleted populations.   Noise pollution means animals and birds cannot hear their mates, cannot warn of danger and cannot hear predators.  The effects of noise pollution on wildlife are similar to the effects of noise pollution in humans, including raised blood pressure, low body weight and hearing loss.  Noise pollution can mess up migration patterns, disrupt food supplies and destroy nesting habitats.

While these effects are expected in urban areas, human encroachment is destructive even in “protected areas” like state and national parks.  In Zion National Park, most of which was designated as wilderness in 2009, visitation doubled between 1982 and 1997 to more than 2.6 million visitors per year, most of whom lined up to drive through the park’s famous canyon. In 2000, however, the park banned vehicles during the its busiest times and created a mandatory shuttle system. The ban has improved the area’s sound quality for visitors and wildlife in the wilderness and non-wilderness portions of the park. Before the ban, several wildlife species had moved further and further from the main roads to avoid the sound of vehicles. Today, visitors have reported seeing mountain lions from the shuttle buses.

What can Eco Warriors do to combat this form of pollution?  The obvious answer is to quiet down. Restrict your use of motorized vehicles and appliances, turn down your stereos and television sets, participate in “silent sports” and employ manual tools for outdoor and indoor work.  Enviro Girl uses a rake and broom instead of a leaf blower.  She uses a broom instead of a vacuum for daily cleaning.  She rides a bicycle and cross-country skis instead of motorboating or riding a snowmobile.  Trees help muffle sound, and Enviro Girl has planted many.  When you reduce the distance your food and other goods travel, you reduce noise pollution.

You can also support policies that control noise pollution. You can call in violations of noise ordinances (like Enviro Girl did on that night long ago) or get involved at the state and local level by supporting quiet public spaces, like advocating for bans on motorized vehicles on park & recreation trails.

To learn more about noise pollution and what you can do to muffle the chatter, check out these links:  Shhh! 10 Ways to Quiet Noisy National Parks and The Quiet Use Coalition.

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Too Much Light in the Night

Posted on September 19, 2011 by | 4 Comments

Like most eco-warriors, Enviro Girl recycles, picks up other people’s litter, avoids flushing harmful chemicals down the drain and tries to reduce her emissions by sharing rides and consolidating her driving errands.  She’s aware of pollution in all of its forms, even pollution most people don’t think about:  light pollution.

If you step outside at night, can you see the stars in the sky?  If you can’t easily pick out the Big Dipper, it’s due to light pollution.  It’s true–too much light is an environmental hazard, causing problems beyond making urban stargazing a difficult hobby.

Light pollution is simply too much light at night, usually unnecessary light or wasted light, that disrupts the habitat of all kinds of creatures.   Why is too much light at night a problem?

For starters, it’s often a waste of energy.  What’s the point in completely illuminating an entire area reaching up to the clouds?  Sure, some night lighting is essential for safety reasons, but much of the light we create at night serves no useful purpose.  Enviro Girl has several outdoor light fixtures at her house, but she only turns them on as they’re needed, not every night.  And inside her entire house, only one windowless bathroom has a small nightlight that turns on when the room grows dark–all of the other lights go off at night.

Energy use aside, too much light at night disrupts human sleep patterns because light is part of the biological prodding that wakes us up just as darkness helps us sleep.  Light at night messes up migrating birds, feeding patterns of nocturnal creatures and insect breeding.  Take a firefly for example.  A firefly finds a mate by flashing at night–when there’s too much light, there’s no way a firefly can find a mate.  Many firefly populations have disappeared because they’ve no safe place to live.  Nocturnal mammals rely on darkness for cover–when everything is bright at night, they become easy prey and their numbers diminish. Nesting sea turtles rely on the cover at night to lay their eggs–but the bright artificial lights on many beaches confuse the turtles, who now cannot find a safe spot to nest.  According to National Geographic, this results in hundreds of thousands of lost hatchlings a year--just in Florida!  It’s easy for Enviro Girl to pull a shade and restore darkness so she can sleep at night, but the animals, birds, insects and fish do not have this capability.

Light pollution makes the night sky impossible to see in many parts of the world, it also makes it impossible to study.  The constant haze of light separates people from amazing views of the night sky just as much as noise pollution can separate people from the sounds of nature.

What’s both frustrating and encouraging about light pollution is that it’s an easy problem to fix.  By redesigning light fixtures, we can save energy, preserve our view of the night sky and reduce disrupting nature.  The worst kinds of night light include globe lights, billboards, under-lit signs, wall-mounted non-directional fixtures and mercury vapor lights (commonly known as “barn lights”).  A small detail like designing night lighting to light from above to below instead of from below to above makes all the difference.  Check out these two images:

See how the “globe” fixture lights up the road–not only are there TOO MANY lights illuminating the area (Enviro Girl is hard-pressed to find any value in making it look like broad daylight 24/7), half of the light produced goes into the night sky, serving no discernible purpose.

This image shows a well-lit sidewalk.  Almost all of the light produced is targeted to a specific area and very little is escaping into the night sky.  The area is safe without much light reflecting above or beyond where it’s needed.

Enviro Girl appreciates the need for some night lighting to keep people safe, but most of the night lighting she encounters is purely for cosmetic or commercial purposes.  She’s happy to do her part by keeping her neck of the woods dark and welcomes nocturnal creatures who need darkness to survive.  By keeping her lights off at night, bats, owls, rabbits, mice, toads, frogs, raccoons, foxes, skunks, coyotes and yes, even those wonderful fireflies can survive.   She also saves on her electric bill, reduces her carbon footprint and preserves the incredible view of the starry sky.

Enviro Girl encourages you to do nature a favor and examine your use of night lighting.  Can you help reduce light pollution?

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Posted in 3 Rs, electronics, green around the world, issues

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Eco Back to School: Green Schools, Green Classrooms

Posted on August 3, 2011 by | Leave a comment

We insure our children’s safety in a thousand different ways every day.  Car seats.  Bicycle helmets.  Mosquito repellent and sunscreen.  Safety locks.  Flu shots.  Teaching them “stranger danger” and how to avoid being bullied on the playground.  Playgrounds with rubber mats and inches of mulch to pad falling children and prevent injuries.  Nationwide recalls on Happy Meal toys posing a choking hazard.

Despite all these measures to keep children safe, most of us think nothing of sending our children to toxic school buildings to spend 7 hours a day, 180 days of a year, for 12-13 years of their lives.

What makes a school a healthy learning environment for millions of  children attending them and the  teachers and support staff working in them?

“Green schools ” need to take things further than providing recycle bins in every classroom and installing energy-efficient light bulbs.  Most school buildings are industrial boxes with few windows and even fewer that open.  Older buildings, while not full of asbestos any longer, often have poor ventilation and high levels of pollutants.  Environmentally healthy schools provide a safe infrastructure and an environment that combine to produce healthy and safe students.


Green Schools, or  Environmentally Healthy Schools, by definition, should include:

*Daylight.  Simply having windows in classrooms alters mood and behavior and reduces electrical use, which saves money and energy.

* Transportation.  Efficient, safe, and emission free are good guidelines.  Safe walking paths are ideal since they leave the least environmental impact (emission free!) and give children a chance to exercise and enjoy fresh air.  Enviro Girl lives in a rural district and she simply asked her school’s principal to have the buses turn off their engines while waiting for students at the end of the day.  By turning off their diesel engines, the air is cleaner, there is less noise pollution and the bus company saves money on fuel.  Encouraging car pooling is another way to reduce energy consumption.

* Good air quality.  Adequate ventilation and reduced environmental toxins mean healthier students.  Simply being able to open windows improves circulation.  This can also help reduce mold.

* Temperature control.  A well-constructed building won’t have drafty classrooms or overheated classrooms.  Radiant heat is one excellent way to efficiently heat large buildings because it maintains even temperatures and uses less fuel.  If your school district is building a new school, chime in on the heating/cool system to maximize your taxpayers’ investment.  Likewise, if your school buildings have extreme temperature fluctuations, advocate for an energy audit to discover if there are more efficient ways to heat/cool the school.

*  Water use.  Safe drinking water should be available at water fountains or spigots.  Low flow toilets and faucets reduce waste and use.  The greenest schools encourage students to bring their own water bottles and refuse to sell bottled water and soft drinks out of vending machines during the school day.

* Access to nature.  Fresh air, exercise, playground areas, “green spaces” for learning make children physically healthier and more able to think and learn.  Trees provide wind, dust and noise barriers while creating shade.  Gardens and native plantings can educate students in a range of topics, including nutrition and biology.

* Healthy food.  The Eco Women could write a week’s worth of posts on this issue, but chemical free, unprocessed, locally produced, nutritious food should be available for students.  Many schools have instituted “healthy snack” policies and banned vending and soda machines.  This is a good start.  The bigger issue is the food served on those cafeteria trays.  Many school cafeterias serve high-salt, high-sugar, high-fat foods like chicken nuggets and canned vegetables.  Enviro Girl was glad her children’s school began contracting with local farmers to make fresh produce available.  It’s a small step in the right direction, even though they have miles to go to make hot lunch healthy and palatable.  Most schools have hired out the cafeteria to a large corporation (like Aramark).  Aramark does provide healthy meal options to customers demanding them.  It’s a small thing to rally parents to put fresh fruit and vegetables on those cafeteria trays.

* No bad chemicals.  Chemicals are used all over school buildings–waste management, pest management, cleaning supplies, mold control, laboratory waste management.  Environmentally healthy schools adopt integrated pest management (IPM) and use nontoxic cleaning supplies.

* Curriculum.  Lessons in all subject areas should include environmental knowledge and awareness of environmental issues.  From Biology to Social Studies, Language Arts to Health, students should learn how their behavior and actions affect the world around them and how nature and people are deeply connected.  For teachers, Planet Pals and The Sierra Club are great resources.

All of these elements combine to make our students healthier and improve their ability to learn.  These factors also combine to make public education cost-effective by reducing consumption.  According to Building Green Schools, the cost benefits include: less electrical use, lowered emissions, and reduced illness.  Whether lobbying for nontoxic, biodegradable cleaning supplies, new ventilation systems, or improved lunch programs, there are many ways parents can advocate for a healthier school environment.  The majority of our nation’s schools don’t meet the healthiest, greenest standard.  These issues encompass more than the physical structure of a school.

Is your children’s school green?  Which of these areas might your school improve?

By coordinating parent support for these issues and lobbying your school board, your school’s administrators and your school’s PTA/PTO, you can make your school greener and healthier for everyone learning and working there.  By tackling one issue, one project, one area at a time, this challenge is less daunting and the payoff is immediate.    It’s about a cleaner planet AND our children’s safety.

All images are from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Green School Poster Program.

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Posted in 3 Rs, green around the world, health, issues, living green on a budget, school, transportation

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Eco Back-to-School: Make Your PTO/PTA a Greener Organization

Posted on July 25, 2011 by | 2 Comments

Few organizations wield as much power in school districts as parent/teacher organizations.  They influence decision-making.  They affect morale.  They connect people–parents, teachers, administrators, communities.  PTO/PTA groups do good things, but Enviro Girl would argue that they can do good things with even greater environmental consciousness.  Positioned as PTA president for her kids’ elementary school, she has encouraged changes in how the parent organization and the school does business.  It only takes one parent to act as a catalyst for change at their child’s school.  Some take on curriculum, others become vigilant soldiers in the war for  playground safety, and Enviro Girl has become a one-woman show touting environmental issues at her kids’ school.  Below are just a few ways any ordinary person can become an Eco-Superhero and “green” their local PTO/PTA.

1) Keep fundraising event focused (Family Night Out, Brain Bowl, talent night etc.).  People have enough stuff, so quit selling it.  People enjoy events and events build community spirit and bring the focus on FUN instead of STUFF.   Enviro Girl’s PTA has held donkey basketball games, carnivals, sock hops and spaghetti dinners.  Her PTA’s biggest fundraiser is the Brain Bowl–participating students collect pledges and then get quizzed on questions designed by their grade level’s teaching team.  The Brain Bowl requires volunteers and 2-3 reams of paper.  The profit for their organization averages $8,500 a year.  Enviro Girl’s PTA keeps the Brain Bowl from getting stale by limiting who participates–only grades PreK-2 do it, so the participation rate never flags. Enviro Girl gets regular solicitations from companies begging her PTA to sell their pizzas and gift wrap and candles.  She gives them her standard rejection line, “Sorry, but we only do event-based fundraising.  No thanks!”

2) If fundraising must be employed, try to do this through local businesses.  Reject the magazine subscriptions from a company in Texas or candles shipped in from China. Gift certificates from the cheese factory up the road, spirit wear from a local seamstress and crafts from local artists are all acceptable “stuff” to sell.  Fundraising in this fashion keeps the money local and increases the quality of the products sold.   (Even though her PTA doesn’t sell them, those cheese gift certificates are very popular in Enviro Girl’s neck of the woods, especially around the holidays.)

3) Purchase exclusively from locally owned and operated businesses. Sure, treats for Student Appreciation Day cost less at Sam’s Club, but the guy with the local grocery store up the road is part of your community and hey, his price isn’t unfair.  Consider the time/money/energy you save by driving a half mile for treats instead of driving 20 miles!  By supporting local merchants, you reduce transportation costs and spread the local love and support that you ask in return every time you knock door-to-door soliciting silent auction donations or Little League sponsors.  It’s hypocritical to beg the local businesses to help out your group when you never patronize them.

4) Purchase and use a few big Igloo cooler/drink dispensers for events like the teachers’ luncheons and school dances.  Instead of buying bottled water, offer lemonade and water in the coolers with sleeves of paper cups. The cost difference is nil, the reduction in plastic trash and waste is significant.

5) Organize t-shirt swaps–instead of parents purchasing new school shirts each year for the early childhood field trips, coordinate passing along t-shirts each year. The same t-shirt swap can work for park & rec sports teams and Scouts, too!

6) Put money and elbow grease into the abandoned and decrepit Nature Center on your school’s property or create a native prairie or garden on that unused tract of grass in front of your school building.  With the PTA’s support and some grant money, Enviro Girl’s kids have a nature center used on a regular basis by classrooms and ecology has become a huge part of their classroom curriculum with the new resources made available.  One of the most popular summer school classes at their elementary school is Bird Watching!   The PTA recruited Boy Scouts needing Eagle Scout projects to build an outdoor classroom in the Nature Center and now the space is even used by community groups!  Their nature center includes a butterfly garden, prairie and woods so students can explore a variety of ecosystems in one area.   The biodiversity of a schoolyard garden is healthy for the environment and provides the school with an excellent teaching tool.

7) Support the schools’ “healthy foods” campaign by offering yogurt and muffins in lieu of cookies and candy bars as a snack on test days.  If your school doesn’t have a “healthy snacks” rule, advocate for one.

8) Support TerraCycle programs by recycling drink pouches or any of the other packaging the company upcycles.

9) Show your teachers love and appreciation by serving them meals or buying classroom supplies.  Quit buying them coffee mugs and pens and plastic crappe.  Teachers really appreciate food and books, consumable and plastic-free.

10) Go paperless by setting up a website or Facebook group and emailing monthly meeting agendas and minutes.  Enviro Girl’s PTA has done so, creating less work and using fewer resources, resulting in greater parent participation.  Turns out everyone is on Facebook these days, while few folks read the school’s monthly newsletter cover to cover.  (Enviro Girl’s PTA still provides paper copies of all communication per parent request.)

11) Take on the environmental issues at your children’s school.  Request that the school busses turn off their engines while idling in front of the building at the end of the day.  Advocate for healthier school lunches.  Beg the school to use non-toxic cleaning supplies.  Demand that the school building meets air and water quality standards.  With the weight of a PTA/PTO behind a movement, great change can take place.

12) Support environmentally conscious curriculum.  Pay for a guest speaker or a school assembly like Shows That Teach or ECOSiZEME to educate students and raise awareness about environmental issues like pollution, trash, consumerism or water conservation.   Hire an artist-in-residence for your school to demonstrate how to use recycled trash to create beautiful things.  Buy books or magazines for the school library or classrooms that take on environmental issues.

13)  Recycle for cash! Enviro Girl’s school just earned $1,000 by holding a paper drive–community members dropped off 2 industrial dumpsters full of their paper for recycling which the PTA then sold to a local paper company.  This is probably the easiest and least invasive fundraising the group ever did and it was good for the planet because it concentrated on reusing and recycling instead of consumption.

Some of these ideas cost money, others are free or cost-neutral. The bottom line is this: one parent CAN make a difference by bringing one idea to the table and “greening” one part of a school’s practice.  What can you do this year at your child’s school to make it greener?

Disclaimer:  The Eco Women are not employed by any of the companies or groups mentioned in this post.

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Posted in 3 Rs, eco kids, issues, living green on a budget, school

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Crafty Kraft Sneaking Veggies into the Mix

Posted on July 18, 2011 by | 3 Comments

Enviro Girl read this news piece recently about Kraft adding cauliflower to their trademark macaroni and cheese recipe.  Reportedly this move is a response to consumer demand to help kids eat more vegetables–by sneaking them into meals.  Apparently the cauliflower gets freeze-dried and then pulverized into powder before it’s added to the pasta flour used to make the noodles.

On one hand, Enviro Girl is a lazy mom who hates hates hates to make dinner and constantly battles to get her kids to eat healthy.

On the other hand, Enviro Girl scoffs at the notion that a half cup of pulverized, freeze-dried vegetables has any significant nutritional value.  Especially when combined with the salt, sugar and chemicals included in processed convenience foods like Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.  Enviro Girl knows a clever ad campaign will convince well-meaning parents that this is a healthier option to feed their kids.  She also knows she’s not buying this line.  The best vegetables are plain old vegetables, raw, steamed, seared, pureed, sliced, diced, chopped or mashed.  She gets the veggies down her kids’ throats by setting them on the table and on their plates.  Hungry before dinner?  Eat carrots–they’re sitting right there, easy to grab and munch.

Part of the issue here is the perception about food.  Kids can be picky eaters, prone to wanting only grains and sweets when they’re young.  Does that mean we don’t provide kids with foods that are good for them?  Does that mean we quit putting a serving of vegetables on their plates?   Is it possible a kid might try eating cauliflower (or peas or beans or beets) simply because they’re prepared well and look desirable?  (Slightly grey and very mushy vegetables dumped out of a can and reheated don’t appeal to most kids, but a bright pile of seasoned steamed squash, peppers and zucchini could coax them into tasting.)

The emphasis in most families is on the main course–the meat and grain served at a meal.  Could the perception shift if parents asked “what vegetable should I make for supper tonight?”  Could the perception shift if more than one vegetable was offered as a side dish?  Would kids eat more vegetables if they weren’t already stuffed full of sugary carbohydrates?

Another issue is cost.  It’s amazing that a box of convenience food containing freeze-dried, pulverized cauliflower costs less than an actual head of cauliflower.  Consumer demand needs to push food producers to making healthy food an accessible and affordable option for everyone.  And if the heavy hitters like Con Agra and Kraft won’t do it, then we can take our business elsewhere–to the farm up the road, to our own back yards.

It’s possible, Enviro Girl thinks, for parents to reclaim healthy eating and affordable food for their tables.  But it’ll mean thinking outside of the box.

Tell the Eco Women, what’s your take on this issue?

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Posted in food, issues

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