Green Daily

Yes, what I'm asking is if it's okay to eat a baby animal if it had a good, albeit short life?

Proponents of pasture-raised "rose veal" say that their veal is fundamentally different from the nightmarish image of animals kept in pens so small they are unable to move, and pumped full of antibiotics to stave off rampant infection, a.k.a. "white veal."

For years chefs have been complaining about the bland taste of pen-raised white veal, which are kept in crates so small they can't turn or lie down, and fed a diet of artificial milk. The main appeal, if you could get past the cruelty issue, was tenderness: you can cut it with the side of a fork. Rose veal has a more developed flavor because of a mixed diet of milk and grains, and the milk often actually comes from its mother. This kinder veal is growing in popularity with foodies, especially those who espouse whole animal, sustainable practices.

Many of our friends at PETA, and other animal-rights organizations, believe that we shouldn't be eating meat or drinking milk in the first place, but if you are, it's unspeakably cruel to take animals away from the mother at such a young age. Generally they make little or no distinction between pink and white veal.

When you're a kid, Halloween is your chance to get a ton of candy, for free, which you then eat until you get sick. And when you're an adult, it's a reason to buy all the candy you'd normally never let in the house ... which you then eat until you get sick.

Here's the truly scary part: it's not just overeating that makes you sick, it's the stuff in most commercially produced candy bars that will make you turn green, even if you're only reading the label!

I was checking out Fitsugar, and was reminded that most candy contains high fructose corn syrup and food coloring. Bad, but if you're only indulging once or twice a year, not going to kill you. But then there are the hydrogenated oils, which are so bad they even cause miscarriages!

An Open Letter to Starbucks:

Dear Starbucks,

We have our love-hate relationship. Sure, the pumpkin spice latte is hard to resist. But your inability to put compostable -- or even recyclable -- cups in stores until 2012* makes me see red. If I can buy compostable hot cups at the supermarket, then you can order them in bulk with your logo printed on them!

Even giving you credit for the "cup summit" in May, when you brought together recycling experts to talk about The Cup, it's despicable for you, the largest specialty coffee company in the world to be so bad, and so late to the game, at managing your waste stream.

Besides the cup issue, many of your stores don't even offer recycling. Just last month, you launched a pilot recycling program in Manhattan with Global Green USA's Coalition for Resource Recovery. That's definitely the right thing to do, but you don't deserve praise for it. More like, "Hello, it's 2009! It's about time you dealt with recycling the literally billions of cups your customers produce each year. WTH took you so long?"

Plenty of us like getting our fruit fixes through juice -- it's portable, tasty, and often less messy than eating a piece of fruit. But are you sure you're really getting fruit in your juice, or are there a bunch of added, artificial flavors? And what about the packaging -- is your juice killing the planet?

Naked Juice makes it simple for eco-warriors to get their juice on, naturally. They start with real fruit that is sustainably sourced (all bananas are Rainforest Alliance Certified, and all the fruit and veggie blends are non-GMO, or non-genetically modified organisms). They also work with suppliers to make sure they're ethical both socially and environmentally.

The creation of the juice is sustainbly done, too. Naked Juice's packaging is recyclable, as is most of their suppliers' packaging, and they're constantly working to improve their waste and energy reduction at every stage of the game. All products are transported on recyclable plastic pallets (durable and lighter than wood), reducing fuel used for transport and saving trees.

It was hard, but I've given up Chilean Seabass. It's probably the world's most delicious fish, and consequently it's been overfished practically to the point of extinction. No eating seafood on the red list!

At least I still have my tuna sashimi, right?

Sadly, no. Bluefin tuna, a.k.a. the amazingly tasty dark pink flesh you get at fine sushi restaurants, is one of the most badass looking fish in the sea. However, scary looking as they are, these bad boys are just as vulnerable to mankind's excess as the rest of the animal kingdom. And now they're on the red list, too.

I do my best to avoid drinking bottled water, but every once in a while, I find myself someplace where the tap water just tastes (or smells, or looks) bad. But I have a solution now -- EcoUsable Ech20 filtered water bottles.

The stainless steel bottles aren't just BPA-free -- they also have a personal filtration system, so you can take icky, gross water and turn it into clean, tasty agua in seconds (seriously, I took part in a demo of this at Surf Expo and the water went from brown to crystal clear, and tasted great).

They offer multiple sizes and colors, and are priced reasonably -- the 18 oz. filtered water bottles are $34.99, and the 25 oz. version is $39.99. Replacement filters are offered on the site as well, for $24.99. Bottoms up!

The island nation of Madagascar is a refuge for several species of endangered animals. An amazing 5% of the world's biodiversity can be found on the world's fourth largest island, located in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Africa.

International funding and support for conservation programs have helped preserve many of these unique species, including the iconic lemur. But this year the political climate became so volatile that Madagascar was suspended from the African Union, and a great deal of international conservation support was forced to withdraw.

Now that those pesky eco-watchdogs are out of the way, 60 Second Extinction Countdown at Scientific American reports that poachers are having a field day with the natural resources of Madagascar, harvesting timber and -- this really awful -- selling endangered lemurs to restaurants as a luxury food delicacy.

We've all done it. In a weak moment at Walgreens, or maybe at the gym, you see the appealingly slender bottle of SmartWater, with all of those magical electrolytes that you've been conditioned to believe will make you stronger, thinner and (yes) smarter. Your good tap water intentions fly out the window and before you know it you're locking lips with Jennifer Aniston -- metaphorically speaking, of course.

Remember to stay strong! Don't give in to the lure of Jen's sunkissed smile and promises of Hollywood glamour!

It's easy to find information to help you strengthen your tap water drinking resolve. Our clever friends over at Fit Sugar have a great list of the reasons to pick tap water over bottled water, many of which are echoed by ingenious folks at Tappening:

You may have noticed palm oil in the news recently.

Confectionery giant Cadbury bowed to pressure in New Zealand -- including a boycott of their products at the Auckland Zoo -- and reverted to the recipe of their Dairy Milk bar that contains cocoa butter instead of palm oil. Last week LUSH Cosmetics announced that they will no longer use palm oil because of environmental concerns.

Why all the hubbub? For those of you unfamiliar with The Palm Oil Problem, let me share the basics.

Photo by ReUsies.com.

I know it's barely mid-August, but yes, it's time to start thinking about keeping things eco-friendly for a new school year. One way to keep your kids' carbon footprint light is to pack them healthy, fresh lunches using local, organically grown food.

And then you need to find a waste-free, green way to pack them!

Wrapping up
Do you experience daily ziplock baggie guilt? They can't be recycled, and some of us (Me! Yes! I admit it!) find the whole wash out zip lock bags thing kinda gross, so every time you use one it's an exercise in waste. You can go for compostable paper wraps, 100% recycled tin foil, or my favorite, nylon-lined cotton ReUsies. They come in sandwich or the slightly smaller snack size, and a couple dozen designs.

(Photo by Tropicana)

Recently, Tropicana invited me, along with a number of other bloggers, to their Chicago headquarters to learn about their efforts toward sustainability. I was skeptical. Tropicana is a huge corporation -- they're part of Pepsico, after all, and I just hadn't heard all that much about their efforts to help the planet.

Let me just say I was pleasantly surprised by what I learned.

For starters, they do their best to keep things local. Out of every 10 oranges harvested, 9.5 come from Florida. The other half an orange comes from Brazil, which is a necessity in case Florida has a bad hurricane season or loses too many orange trees to frost. For example, in 2004, Florida was down 250 million trees after the hurricanes and a bout of citrus canker.

Every day it seems like another new all-natural and organic brand hits the market. It's hard, and kind of a hassle, to try to track down the story and to verify that all of these products really are made with TLC ... and not BPA!

It used to be that you could take a stroll or bike ride down to the local food co-op and chat with the folks behind the counter to get scoop on all the products sold there. Often you could even meet the producers or farmers, because practically everything was sourced locally.

For better or worse, times have changed and we have literally the entire world at our finger tips. And soon we will have a resource that blends that co-op feeling with the convenience and choice of the internet. Abe's Market is a new online marketplace where you can shop for all-natural beauty, food, kids' stuff, and home and garden goods, plus participate in a community to exchange information and tips. It's sort of like the co-op with the bulletin board except you can go there at 3 a.m. if you feel like it, and have it all delivered to you.

(Photo by Geoff Burke, Getty Images)

There's a new eco-friendly beer on tap in The Great Lakes State, and the brewmeister is none other than terminally shirtless rap/rock/country crooner Kid Rock. Apparently, Mr. Rock has been carefully perfecting this beer's flavor for the past year and now it's ready for mass consumption. Here's how Kid Rock describes the beer to the Detroit Free Press:

""American-style lager ... easy to drink without an aftertaste... I'm American, that's what I like to drink, and from looking around the parking lot before my shows, I know that's what my fans drink,"

Thoughtfully dubbed "American Badass Beer," the brew was unveiled at two of Kid Rock's concerts in Detroit last week and is now available statewide in Michigan. American Badass Beer (I'm already getting really annoyed with that title) will be available nationwide over the next year.

If you were getting excited about the prospect that Kid Rock might hang up the microphone and work full time at the brewery, sorry, no such luck. The Michigan Brewing Company is undertaking the production duties, which is also the reason it qualifies as a green beer. The Michigan Brewing Company, like a few other major green breweries, produces its own power from biodiesel generators.

In fact, nearby MSU students are unwittingly aiding Kid Rock's efforts to market his poorly-named green brew. Fryer grease from their cafeterias is powering the aforementioned generators. If the food at Michigan State's cafeterias is anything like the ones at my school, there should be grease aplenty. There was probably enough grease pumping out of our cafeterias to power the entire campus.

I'd warn other green brewers like New Belgium and Sierra Nevada to watch out, but I don't think American Badass Beer is really targeting their demographic. Something about the name and the beer's celebrity spokesman leads me to think that ABB will not be a favorite among the Prius-driving public.

You may have already seen a few of these funky bottles lurking around your local grocery store. Anheuser-Busch has been using them for a couple of years now as well as some of the other beer giants. A few months ago, Coca-Cola announced plans to start rolling these babies out in limited venues across the country. Now, Rexam, a huge consumer packaging company, has jumped into the aluminum bottle market. So, I'm guessing that we're destined to see a lot more of them.

The good news is that, in terms of sustainability, aluminum bottles look like a clear winner over glass. For starters, one of these new aluminum bottles weighs in at about 20 grams, whereas a comparable glass bottle weighs about 180-200 grams. Obviously, weight plays a huge factor in an item's carbon footprint, so we're talking about some serious reductions in shipping emissions. Not bad, eh?

(Photo by Adwriter on Flickr)

Last Thursday I was grocery shopping with a friend. Produce is amazing this time of year and I couldn't resist grabbing a couple of fragrant, juicy peaches.

"What are you doing?" she asked me, horrified. "Those aren't organic!"

I looked at her blankly.

"The dirty dozen? Thin skinned fruit? Pesticides?" she prompted, which jolted my memory. Reluctantly I put down the filthy fruit, and went in search of the clean(er) organic version.

With so many other things to remember, I honestly don't feel bad that I forgot about the dirty dozen. But it did make me think about ways to make it easier to remember them.