Solar Powered Salad

April's Sustainable Living Tip

Make the switch to a solar-powered salad by growing your own organic vegetable garden: instead of depending on petroleum to fertilize, transport, and refrigerate your produce, tap into the sun's energy to produce healthy, fresh food for you and your family.

More Facts About "Solar Salads"

1. Fifty years ago, most salad ingredients came from home gardens and farms within 50 miles of the eater; nowadays, most salad ingredients eaten in the United States come from California, Florida, Canada or Mexico.
2. Studies show that the nutritional value of conventionally-grown fruits and vegetables has declined over the last 50 years. Organically-grown heirloom varieties are not suffering from this nutritional decline. Scientists are trying to understand why conventional crops are now providing less nutritional value compared to organic crops.
3. Commercial varieties of lettuce, carrots, tomatoes and other vegetables are now bred for appearance, ability to survive long-distance shipping, and uniform ripening, so an entire crop can be harvested at the same time and sent to market.
4. Heirloom varieties are bred primarily for taste and staggered ripening, to provide fresh vegetables throughout the growing season.
5. Crops grown for salads are mostly water, so you could view our current large-scale agriculture and supermarket system as a very expensive and unsustainable way to transport water across the continent.
6. In cold months, salads consisting of root vegetables are a way to harness solar energy that has been collected by plants and stored for months without any need for batteries or high-tech equipment.
7. Plants create wealth literally out of thin air: during the growing season plants use solar energy to combine carbon from carbon dioxide gas in the air with hydrogen from water to create complex carbohydrates. One tomato seed worth a few pennies can create several dollars worth of tomatoes.
8. Picking fresh food from your own garden eliminates the waste of transportation, storage and refrigeration caused by supermarket produce.
9. Fertilizing your soil with home-made compost avoids dependence on fertilizers synthesized from natural gas and other fossil fuels. Healthy soils require nourishment. A sustainable source of that nourishment is compost you make yourself from food scraps you would otherwise send to the landfill, incinerate, or wash down the garbage disposal.
10. Leafy greens are one of the best crops you can grow to save money, protect your family's health, and improve the nutritional value of your meals. They are also a very flexible plant to grow: you can grow greens in flats indoors, in a container on a porch, in raised beds, or in conventional rows in the ground. Any way you do it, you'll be protecting our country's water supply, cutting down on the number of trucks on the highway, reducing the electricity demand of your local supermarket, and providing your family with affordable nutritional value.
11. Although scientific understanding of human health and nutrition is still in its infancy, there is evidence that omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids are essential to normal growth and development. Leafy green vegetables and whole grains are the most sustainable dietary source of these nutrients. Fish get omega fatty acids from algae and concentrate them in their tissues, but unfortunately fish oil also concentrates heavy metals such as mercury, which is now a pervasive environmental pollutant from coal-burning power plants. A diet high in leafy greens is a safer alternative to fish oil for omega fatty acids because leafy greens do not contain concentrations of heavy metals.
12. Have young children who won't eat their spinach? Try chopping it and mixing it in with spaghetti sauce or adding it to meatballs if your family eats meat. You'll be surprised how much healthy food you can sneak past your picky eaters!
13. Another fun strategy to encourage your family to eat their veggies is to involve them in planting seeds. While they might not have the patience to help with all the weeding, young kids do like to plant seeds and watch them grow. Try a variety of different kinds of lettuces to pique their interest. Which grow fastest? Which will taste the best? They'll be naturally curious to try eating what they've started. Plus, by the time the harvest is ready they'll have a much better understanding of where their food actually comes from.