The Red, White, and Green

Photo via Flickr: roman.petruniak

Great article today on Sustainable Table, about the movie Julie and Julia and how important it is to our health to embark on our own cooking adventures. It was written by my friend Joey Lee of the Meatless Monday campaign, but the purpose of her post is not to dictate what, specifically, to cook (e.g., vegetarian cuisine), but rather to inspire the simple yet profoundly life-changing act of stepping in the kitchen. “When you immerse yourself in the food you eat,” she writes, “when it is your hands in the dough, or your force behind the knife, you cannot help but become more mindful of what is going into your body.”

Cooking has always been one of my life’s great joys (I was making popovers at age 5), but I know how daunting it can seem to start cooking if you’ve never done it before, and how challenging it can be to find the time, even if you are pretty proficient in the kitchen (not to mention the space, if you live in a 200-square-foot NYC apartment, like I once did). But start small; it’s the little changes that can often spark a metamorphosis.

That sentiment has been preoccupying my brain since I attended a Project Butterfly workshop in downtown Los Angeles earlier this week led by Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne, authors of The Urban Homestead and leaders in the DIY/urban sustainability movement. The lecture covered some fairly heady undertakings, even for a greenie like me: container gardening, raising chickens in the city, and brewing beer, among them.

But the one point they stressed was to just make one small change. Start by growing super-easy garlic “chives” on your windowsill, Coyne said: Take a few garlic bulbs, plant them in some dirt, and delicious green leaves will grow that you can snip and use as garlicky-flavored chives. So then you start using the chives to flavor the food you cook — even something as simple as scrambled eggs — and because they make everything taste more delicious, maybe you start cooking more at home. And then, maybe because you’re cooking more at home, you become motivated to start visiting your local farmers market to shop for produce, and then you feel adventurous enough to plant a few more herbs on your windowsill, and before you know it, you’ve carved out your own little sustainable corner of the city.

Looking for other inspiring ideas? Check out Coyne and Knutzen’s blog, Homegrown Evolution.

–Jennifer Grayson

Related posts:
WATCH: Organic kitchen herb garden
Meatless Monday: BK Farmyards makes it easy to grow your own fruits and veggies
Spotted: Parking strip vegetable garden

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