Green House

Cheese sticks
Horizon Organic
Another good option for your kids' lunches: Horizon Organic's cheese sticks, available in mozzarella and colby. There are individually packaged sticks in each bag, bad for packaging, good for getting your kids to eat dairy at school.
And they're really tasty.
The mozzarella sticks have 80 calories and five grams of fat each (no trans fat).
The colby has 100 calories and nine grams of fat each (no trans fat).
If you're one of those "My kids won't get fat on my watch!" moms, keep in mind that these offer up 20 percent of your needed daily calcium. Let the kids have cheese, just get them moving, too.
And take a look at the ingredient lists for these cheese sticks:
Colby ingredients: Organic pasteurized cultured milk, salt, annatto (vegetable color), microbial enzymes (non-animal, rennetless)
Mozzarella ingredients: Organic pasteurized cultured part-skim milk, salt, microbial enzymes (non-animal, rennetless).
They're not using rennet. Rennet is a substance used to turn milk into cheese. It comes from the stomachs of baby cows.
Why make cheese without rennet? Let's just say the baby cows don't just hand over their tummies and keep chewing their cud.
I could list a million good things about Horizon Organic, but I'll just sum up the general idea: Family-owned farms, organic ingredients, better-treated cows, hormone-free milk, etc. The list keeps on going. Check it out yourself at Horizon Organic's Web site.

In my last entry, I confessed that my ComEd bill was nearly triple what I used to pay. So much for being energy efficient. But that entry reminded me of something I've been meaning to get around to talking about: a new energy program.

When you make a phone call, you usually get billed based on the rate at the time you made the call.
When you buy a plane ticket, you pay the price attached to that seat at the time you buy the ticket.
But when you use electricity, you usually pay an average rate instead of paying what the rate is at the time you're using it.
Or that was true until ComEd offered its Residential Real-Time Pricing Program that lets you pay the going rate for kilowatts at the time you used them.
A reader we'll call Felicity e-mailed me with the details. (Normally, I'd do full disclosure, but we're using a pseudonym because her job could get a little ticked about her singing the praises of this program to me.)
The best part is when you can use free energy. That's right: FREE.

Nearly three months ago, I asked what kind of electric bills people get.
One very green thing to do, obviously, is to cut back on power whenever possible, to avoid the not-very-friendly processes we use to create electricity. (Think coal-powered plants.)
And I said I'd spill about my bill.
How I wish I had done so before my air-conditioning was fixed. (If you feel like fessing up after my confession, tack on a comment or e-mail me.)
Commenter Ms. McD said she and her husband pay about $63 a month on ComEd's budget plan. She, the keeper o' the green, sets the thermostat to 80 when the AC is on. And she's not escaping to a cold office. She works part-time and her husband is retired. So they're sitting in their 80-degree house being uber-energy efficient.
Commenter Tom is in a new home and keeps bills down by competing with himself to see how low he can go. His lowest bill so far was $67.35 in May. In the winter, it gets a little ugly, hitting $107. (But, Tom, rest assured this is much lower than the bills of the folks' getting green makeovers on TV.)
I, on the other hand, just got a ComEd bill for $87. I'm ashamed. That sounds silly, but I am.

Soy-based waxed paper
If You Care all natural waxed paper
This is 100 percent unbleached, all-natural waxed paper.
If you've been reading this blog for long, you know that "all-natural" doesn't mean anything. No one is producing products with molecules not found on earth, so anyone can claim "all natural.
What the brand, If You Care, means is that this waxed paper is biodegradable, landfill-safe and made using renewable resources. The packaging is made from recycled paper and printed with vegetable-based inks. It's not bleached, so they aren't slopping chlorine into the environment. The wax traditionally used on waxed paper is paraffin, a petroleum based product. (Why does gas cost so much? Part of the reason is that we're using the petroleum it's made from in everything else, including your waxed paper.) Instead, If You Care uses soybeans for the same waxed feeling and protection. And there's no sharp tearing edge, but it still tears fine. You end up feeling like you could eat the whole roll with no adverse effects.
This 75-square-foot package can run between $4 and $5, so doing the right thing isn't going to come cheap. If helping Ma Nature doesn't have you ready to pull out a fiver, shop around. There are other brands offering similar products. The keys are: unbleached and soy wax. (Some brands offer unbleached, soy waxed paper bags to replace our plastic ones, too.)
It's worth looking into because we need to start moving away from plastic wrap. Plastic wrap doesn't degrade in landfills. You don't want the convenient cover as you microwave the Spaghettio's to be sitting in a landfill long after Junior has departed this earth.
If that's not enough of a reason, take a long hard look at that kid you're microwaving meals for. There's some suspicion, even in the scientific community, that plastic wrap may be leaching chemicals when put into contact with hot food. Like say in a microwave.
Don't believe me? Stick a piece of plastic wrap against some tomato sauce and stick it in the fridge. Check it in a day. The plastic wrap will have taken on some of the tomato color. If the tomato is leaching into the plastic in a cold setting, what is the plastic doing to the tomato in a hot setting?
No, it's not proven, but do you want to be the guinea pig?
Once again, the earth-friendly choice is the you-friendly choice.

Near the start of summer, our features reporter got an e-mail touting CVS Pharmacy products that would make life easier for busy moms.
Why am I talking about this now? It took me a while to calm down.
See, the product that caught my eye is Playskool's Wash or Toss Cups. They're sippy cups for kids that a poor PR lauded the cups, writing that you can "wash 'em or toss 'em without guilt since you can pick up a 6-pack for $4.49."
Oh, so if it's cheap enough, it's OK to consume unneeded resources and throw plastic in landfills. Nothing says, "I love my baby," like adding garbage that will still be there for your baby's baby's baby.
I became incensed. (It was that kind of day.) I vented.
Then I learned that if you need plastic cups for your kids, this isn't a bad choice.

"Greenwashing is the unjustified appropriation of environmental virtue by a company, an industry, a government, a politician or even a non-government organization to create a pro-environmental image, sell a product or a policy, or to try and rehabilitate their standing with the public and decision makers after being embroiled in controversy."

Source Watch (A Project of the Center for Media and Democracy)

They say it better than I can, so I might as well let them say it.
If you're like me, you're really pleased about all of the green products and services out there. But you're also becoming suspicious. When the chemical companies start declaring their products natural and eco-friendly, you have to get suspious.
See, these companies and people have realized consumers are becoming eco-conscious and that there's money to be made if you can hitch your wagon to the earth's welfare.
But you know what makes even more money? Doing things the same dangerous way and calling it green to rake in environmentalists' cash.
I'm not one of those cynics who think it's all PR crap designed to part us and our money. I believe there are companies out there who are dedicated to making a difference. I believe there are companies out there who aren't dedicated to the earth's wellbeing but will do the right thing to make more money, and that's OK, too.
But I also know that slapping "natural" on a bottle of chemical cleaner doesn't make it natural. And I know that making up a green label name doesn't make your product good for me or the world.
Even worse, people will buy those faux-green products, believing they are helping. They'll chuck out some great cabinets to replace them with sustainable bamboo ones. You know what's greener than fast-growing bamboo? The cabinets you already have, because their negative impact on the earth has pretty much ended. The energy has already been spent to produce and transport them, they're finished off-gassing and they're not in a landfill. But greenwashing has everyone thinking they can and should renovate their entire house and that doing so is the only green option.

Tune into WCPT 820 AM radio from noon to 2 p.m. Sunday for "The Mike Nowak Show." Vicki Nowicki, of Downers Grove, will be discussing the Liberty Gardens movement and the connection between food and oil (think: eating local.) Joliet's own Jeanne Phelan will be involved in the discussion.
Jeanne's been e-mailing me for a while with interesting things about sustainable farming and other green topics. She's a delight and really gets the food-green connection that I'm just exploring.
She deserves a lot more time than I've given her (it's been a busy couple of months), but I'm going to make amends by learning this stuff and hoping I can know a fraction of what she does about this.
I haven't had the pleasure of talking to Vicki, but in a presentation Jeanne previously invited me to, Vicki was talking about "the ideas that growing some of your own food, developing alternative food systems and eating locally are ways to re-establish our most intimate relationship with nature and rebuild a sense of community and connectedness." Sounds right up my alley.
Jeanne is no newbie to organic home gardening. She and Charlotte and Norm Codo, who own a farm in Frankfort Township, hoped to start a CSA a few years ago. But jumping into thousands of square feet isn't easy. So they scaled back to over 1,000 square feet of organic gardening. Yes, over 1,000 square feet. And that's the scaled back version.
For more on Jeanne and the Codos' work, read Karen Hanson's column on them from The Lincoln-Way Sun.
As for Vicki, Jeanne says she and her husband also are pioneers in the permaculture field.
Since I haven't read up on this enough, I'm going to have to quote Wikipedia to sum up permaculture:

The word permaculture, coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren during the 1970s, is a portmanteau of permanent agriculture as well as permanent culture. Through a series of publications, Mollison, Holmgren and their associates documented an approach to designing human settlements, in particular the development of perennial agricultural systems that mimic the structure and interrelationship found in natural ecologies. Permaculture design principles extend from the position that "The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children" (Mollison, 1990).

Never heard of Mike Nowak? We should probably be tuning in. His Web site promises: Mike knows that good gardeners are good environmentalists and so he dives into green issues such as recycling, water conservation and renewable energy sources.
If you're not free, you should be able to download a podcast from a link on his radio Web site.



In the picture, Vicki is showing some children the produce their garden is kicking out. It's a crop of a shot Jonathan Miano took this month for our sister papers, the weekly Suns. (Good timing, Jonathan!) Vicki now has clients who let her tend to their gardens. They get homegrown goodness in their yards, without having to skip a major meeting for weeding or having to check out every book on organic options.