eating and drinking

Summer’s the easiest time of the year to eat locally. All kinds of fruits and vegetables are starting to ripen, whether in your garden or piling up on stands at the farmer’s market. If you don’t have a patch of dirt to call your own, how about finding a community garden through the American Community Gardening Association? It’s a great way to meet your neighbors and spend less to feed your family great food. If you’d just as soon have the tomatoes and peaches show on your doorstep, consider supporting “community supported agriculture” by joining a CSA. Members who subscribe to CSA farms receive a box of fresh seasonal fruits and veggies each week. To locate a farm or market near you, enter your zip code in the Get Local Info box on The Daily Green's homepage.

Whether or not you read about it in the Climate Change exhibition, you probably already know that bottled water carries a high environmental cost. But have you thought about the hit your wallet takes? Eric Yaverbaum, of Tappening, an anti-bottled water enterprise, has done the math. He estimates that “if you drink 8 glasses a day you will spend $1400 a year buying bottled water” — versus 49 cents for the stuff that comes out of the tap. Based on a typical price of $3.79 per gallon, the Environmental Working Group prices bottled water at 1,900 times the cost of public tap water — and reports that Americans drink twice as much of it as they did ten years ago. That’s probably because they’re worried about crud in the water supply, but tap water in the U.S. is subject to more rigorous purity and testing standards. An October, 2008, study of 10 major brands conducted by the Environmental Working Group found “a surprising array of chemical contaminants,” including disinfectants, fertilizer residue, and pain meds. So ditching the habit can be good for our health, as well as for our budgets and our planet.

It can be hard to think about the health of the planet (or much of anything, frankly) before that first jolt of caffeine. But you can play it smart, and green, by purchasing shade-grown coffee. It’s likely to taste better, cost more, and help combat climate change.

Coffee evolved in the subtropics to grow under taller trees. But over the past several decades, in order to produce higher yields faster, many coffee plantations began to cultivate it under sunnier conditions. Roughly half the growers have cleared forest to plant unshaded coffee, and this deforestation is one of the leading causes of carbon dioxide emissions. Shade-grown farms, on the other hand, not only promote healthy forests that extract carbon from the atmosphere, but boost biodiversity by providing habitat for birds and other animals. They also require far less fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides than sun-coffee plantations.

There’s no official definition of “shade grown,” but several organizations are working on certifications. You can read about them. Or come to Global Kitchen: Climate Change and Coffee at the Museum on Tuesday, February 3 to learn more about where coffee comes from and to sample brews grown under different conditions.