Top 10 Tech Tools for Sustainable Eating

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posted by Megan, selected from Planet Green Jan 10, 2010 2:07 pm

filed under: Conscious Consumer, Diet & Nutrition, Food & Recipes, General Health, Green 101, On The Go, 100 mile challenge, notakeout, online sustainable eating tools

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By Jaymi Heimbuch, Planet Green

Going green in the kitchen can be one of the biggest ways to reduce your impact on the planet. Luckily, in our tech-savvy world, we have access to some great online and electronic tools that help us eat more eco-friendly without adding any hassle to our daily lives. Here are ten resources that will help you make your kitchen an earth-friendly and incredibly appetizing place to hang out.

Favorite Online Resources

1. NoTakeOut
NoTakeOut is a great website for super easy meal planning, shopping, and cooking. It makes cooking at home so easy that take-out seems like an unhealthy hassle. You can subscribe to have a recipe sent to you daily. The ingredient lists are short, the instructions clear, and there are lots of options for going organic and vegetarian.

2. Organic A-Z Videos
Delving into one ingredient per alphabet letter, you’ll learn all about a staple organic ingredient - and what to do with it - in each video. Check out one short clip online per day and learn about how easy it is to incorporate organic food into your diet.

3. 50 Ways to Eat Green
This article is chock full of tips for eating more healthfully and sustainably. And when the list starts out with “Eat More Chocolate,” we’re all eyes and ears! It’s an online article you’ll want to bookmark and reference as you go green in the kitchen.

4. 100 Mile Challenge
Okay, so this one isn’t so easy. In fact, it’s tough, but it’s one of the most impactful things you can do to make your diet more planet-friendly. And there is indeed online help. Planet Green has a 100 Mile Challenge site that can lend support if you decide to become a locavore and stick within a 100 mile radius for all your food purchases.

5. Green Fork Blog
We love this blog for all the helpful advice it lends on how to green your eating. Green Fork highlights leaders in the green food industry and offer eco-conscious tips. It’s hosted by the Eat Well Guide, a handy online database of small-scale farms, restaurants, and other green food outlets throughout the U.S., which is another must-know online resource for sustainable eating.

6. The Daily Plate
Counting calories isn’t just for trimming your waistline. It’s also an important part of lightening your environmental footprint. Eating less means literally consuming fewer resources. Use The Daily Plate to find out what calorie intake you should have to maintain a healthy weight, then track your caloric intake each day to make sure you’re being as healthy as possible for both you and the planet.

Favorite Phone Apps

These five iPhone apps are great options for easy ways to green up your food consumption. If you don’t have an iPhone, there is likely a version of these apps for other smart phone devices like Blackberries and Android phones.

7. Harvest
Harvest provides tips and techniques for choosing the best produce in a store or market, from how to test a watermelon for ripeness, to how to store garlic for optimum freshness. Makes buying fresh foods easier so you can skip packaged meals. This app runs $2.99.

8. Locavore
Also priced at $2.99, Locavore helps you eat local food when it’s in season. Find out what foods are in season while you’re at the market, so you know that you’re buying as responsibly as possible. We’d love it to also feature a farmers’ market finder, since these markets usually carry in-season produce.

9. Foodle
This app is a shopping list that remembers what you like best and helps you locate items nearby. It provides vegetarian and vegan friendly food suggestions to add to your list. It’s on the expensive side at $4.99, but if it saves you trips to the store, and guides you towards a vegetarian or vegan option whenever possible, then it’ll make up for the price in your reduced carbon footprint.

10. Seafood Guide
Finding sustainable seafood is a really big deal for ensuring our oceans stay healthy. But it can also mean standing in a store freezer section or butcher counter hemming and hawwing about which is the best choice for both you and the planet. Instead, quickly pick sustainably caught fish in restaurants and markets with this app from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It tells you which fish are safe, which are good alternatives, and which to avoid buying or eating. Grab this app for a mere $0.99.

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Four Years Later, New Orleans' Green Makeover

From Time

By Bryan Walsh

After Hurricane Katrina flattened New Orleans exactly four years ago, on Aug. 29, 2005, the city emerged as an inadvertent symbol of global warming, the first American victim of climate change. More than 200,000 homes were destroyed during the Category 5 hurricane. But in the years since, the Crescent City has quietly embraced a new and unexpected role as a laboratory for green building. Sustainable-development groups like the international nonprofit Global Green as well as earth-friendly celebrities like Brad Pitt descended on New Orleans, determined not just to build the city back but to build it back green. "It's going to come back," says Matt Petersen, the president of Global Green USA. "But we want to build it better than it was before." (See a TIME special report on the environment.)

No organization is doing more to green New Orleans than Global Green USA, the American arm of the international environmental organization that was founded by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. That begins with the Holy Cross project, an entire sustainable village being built in the city's flood-damaged Lower Ninth Ward with the help of Home Depot's corporate foundation. Eventually the village will include five sustainable homes along with an 18-unit green apartment building and a community center. Three homes have been completed so far, including one that is serving as a de facto visitors center. The point of the project is not just to create greener homes for New Orleans' returning residents but also to provide training for the local building community in green standards. "That's one of the ways to make this kind of building more common and more affordable," says Petersen.

That's the motivation behind Global Green's sustainable-schools program, which will both retrofit existing schools to make them more energy-efficient and build entirely new classrooms from the ground up. The new schools will have solar panels, wetland habitats (which can act as a buffer for future storms) and rainwater cisterns. At Gentilly Terrace Elementary School, which is getting an energy overhaul, power bills should fall some $22,000 a year. In a city that is struggling to get back on its feet, those energy savings make a difference — as does the fact that some research has shown that students actually learn better in greener schools. (It's not exactly clear why that's the case — one possibility is that absenteeism and sick days both decrease when the indoor environment is healthier.) (See pictures of the effects of global warming.)

Beyond model projects like the ones Global Green is implementing, there are broader policy-based actions that seek to green New Orleans from the top down. The city is receiving millions in federal stimulus funds, some of which will be going toward initiatives that will re-establish a citywide recycling program and improve mass transit. About $1.1 million is being slated to help green five of the city's libraries, and more will pay for the installation of solar-powered, ultra-efficient LED streetlights. The Department of Energy — with funds matched by Global Green — is underwriting new solar-power projects in New Orleans as well, hoping to expand the tiny slice of the city's electricity that comes from renewable sources. "The hope is that you can help create green jobs for the city in this way as well," says Petersen. "There can be a silver lining to all of this — the creation of a more robust and vibrant community and economy."

Of course, the work of greening New Orleans has been as complex and intermittent as other parts of the reconstruction process, with delays and bureaucratic obstacles. And there's a legitimate question here: Given the increased risk of hurricanes and rising oceans in a warmer future, should a city that exists under sea level be built back at all? Green or not, will New Orleans ever be safe from global warming?

The truth is, none of us will be safe from global warming unless we can change the way we build and the way we use energy — and New Orleans just happens to provide an excellent opportunity to try that in an urban environment that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Nor will it be the last major city to be menaced by rising seas — from New York to London to Shanghai, most of our major metropolises are built next to an ocean, and it's only a matter of time before the next superstorm hits. If we can build back New Orleans in a way that is both sustainable and resilient, capable of surviving another Katrina, we all might be better prepared for the hot and unstable days to come.

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