sustainability

Some companies strive to provide healthy snacks for employees, but Minneapolis-based Haberman & Associates goes about 10 steps further, with an employee garden that abounds with organically grown vegetables. 

Started in 2009, the plot of land in Delano — nicknamed The Dude Ranch — allows any staff members and their families to work the soil and harvest the bounty, with vegetables distributed free. (check out SGT's previous coverage here). 

In my life, I have access to everything I need and want and more. I often go through my day without thinking about this privilege, easily fulfilling my daily desires: moving from the food coop or farmer’s market to the drugstore to the gas station to the post office, all within minutes of my home. Having just spent a year living in South America, away from all of these conveniences, I have gained a renewed and humbling appreciation for all that I have in America. As a middle class, white American, I experience an access and abundance that is quite extraordinary. In Minneapolis, I also have the good fortune of working as a public health nutrition educator and cooking instructor. Much of my work aims to improve the access and ultimately the health of other Americans who, for a variety of reasons have less ease within the system.

I was excited to see an article in this Sunday’s local paper entitled “Alimentos, Por que no saben como antes?” (“Food, why doesn’t it taste like it used to?”)

The article discusses fruits and vegetables and the fact that what is available today does not taste like what was available in the past. In an optimistic tone however, it goes on to say that there are alternatives to return to the pleasure of the flavors of the past, and highlights various options such as seeking out organic and local agriculture, saving seeds to grow your own, eating seasonally and generally restructuring or re-prioritizing one’s philosophy of life. 

What would you do to really make a difference? Would you give up most seemingly “normal” trappings of modern city life to create the ultimate experiment?

February’s Simple, Good, and Tasty Book Club pick focuses on author Colin Beavan and the year he spent trying to do as little damage to the environment as possible. Beavan eventually spun that year into a book (and accompanying film) entitled No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process.

A few alarming statistics:

Food: we cook it, we eat it, and then we’re done.

Well, not quite. Like the good folk milling around the Tower of Babel, we also spend a great deal of time talking about it, except that we’re not always speaking the same language.

Food is, both figuratively and literally, on everyone’s lips and the discussion has never been so deep or widespread, providing fodder for everyone from filmmakers and politicians to home cooks and bloggers, who all have something different to say about what we eat. The array of issues is so dizzying, it’s enough to make you toss your salad.