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General kitchen advice

Have a Local Food Party : Instead of counting time or distance, simply enjoy the pleasures of local food by organizing a potluck meal in which everything must be local. Keep your fingers crossed that someone will splurge on handmade goat cheese, and don’t forget some local wine, beer or juice. If you’re organizing a big catered event, the Society for Nutrition Education has a downloadable brochure to help you line up local food resources.


Buy Local Food : Cultivate an awareness of how far your food travels. When Rich Pirog, Food Systems Program Leader for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, tracked the miles traveled for 16 types of produce, he found that locally sourced fruits and vegetables such as apples, lettuce and tomatoes traveled an average of 56 miles, compared to 1,494 miles — nearly 27 times farther — for the same fruits and vegetables delivered through conventional retail channels. Things get stickier with combination foods, strawberry yogurt for example. Pirog came up with 2,216 miles by adding up the distance traveled for the yogurt’s milk, sugar and strawberries. That figure could be slashed by 90 percent if you buy plain yogurt and stir in some locally grown honey and fruit.


Buy Organic Foods : There are 12 foods where buying organic makes even more sense than normal.
According to the EWG (Environmental Working Group) the 12 most contaminated foods are:

• apples
• bell peppers
• celery
• cherries
• imported grapes
• nectarines
• peaches
• pears
• potatoes
• red raspberries
• spinach
• strawberries

All tested positive for pesticide residue – even after having been washed! Sweet bell peppers were the vegetable with the most pesticides overall, with 39 pesticides detected on a single sample. Conversely, if you're going to buy conventional, peas, broccoli, onions, pineapples, mangoes, bananas, kiwi and papaya had the lowest occurrence of pesticide residue.

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