Na na na na na

As I was breastfeeding my toddler for what felt like the umpteenth time yesterday, I started to try to think about the postive aspects of nursing forever and ever amen. This is what I am going to try to focus on instead of trying to figure out why this baby just does not want to be weaned. [...]

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Just popping in a for a snack

This would be one of the many squirrels that has discovered the buffet at our backyard compost bin. Hard to see the bins, buried under the 26cm of snow that fell here on Saturday night.

But what hungry squirrel would let 26cm of snow keep them from a tasty snack? Not this one, who dug a [...]

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Litterless lunch

Ever since our family did a one-week garbage-free experiment last summer, I’ve been trying to keep our kids’ packed lunches and snacks as litterless as possible. The average Canadian kid’s lunch (like the one pictured above) is estimated to create about 30 kg of waste each year. I’d been at the kids’ schools at lunch and [...]

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Inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow

The winds are howling, it’s a cool  -6C (-14 with the wind chill) outside and all I can think about is a plan I cooked up to grow a big garden this summer at my parents’ house in the country.
A couple of months I ago I read Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent book Animal, Vegetable Miracle, the tale [...]

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Think eating lo-cal is hard? Try eating local in February

 
A few years ago I wrote a story (see below) for the Montreal Gazette about a British Columbia couple who were following what they called a 100-Mile Diet. For a year, they would only eat food that came from a 100-mile radius of their Vancouver home. Their project later became this book.
Writing that story really put [...]

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Vegging out

 We’ve toyed with vegetarianism over the years. Sick of meat, we launch into delicious veggies, legumes, tofu,  eggs and even texturized vegetable protein for a few weeks. But we always slide back into meat eating, either with a hamburger or some crispy slabs of bacon. Or a big juicy steak from The Keg.
Our flip-flopping on food was [...]

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Slowly rising to the challenge

As part of our family’s quest for a greener lifestyle, I’ve been baking a lot of bread.  Like most people, we love our carbs, but I don’t really like the long list of ingredients on the whole-grain breads we’ve been buying at the supermarket. Sodium Stearoyl-2-lactylate anyone?
We have a bread machine, which takes a lot [...]

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One bite at a time

There was a great interview on The Current this morning (click here, scroll down to Part 3) with Michael Pollan, author of the Omnivore’s Dilemma and a new book called In Defense of Food: an Eater’s Manifesto. You could sum up his last book with these words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
His new book [...]

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