As Gina mentioned earlier, we love our vegetables here at Take Part, and while stumbling around the interweb yesterday, I discovered my new favorite site: Cooking Up A Story.  For those of you who listened to NPR’s All Things Considered yesterday, you too will be familiar with this entertaining and informative site that offers videos and news stories about sustainable food and living.  Whether you want to learn how to make tasty artichoke pesto,  find out what happens on a winery in the winter, or find out why so much food is wasted, you can find it all at Cooking Up A Story.  The site is part of the Local Food Sustainable Network and the videos can be found on YouTube, Hulu, and iTunes.  Keep an eye on them as they plan to launch an overhaul of their website sometime in February.  In the meantime, check out Jonathan Bloom talk about the absurd amount of food that is wasted everyday:

takepart by learning how to waste less food and help those in need with Feeding America.

I’m too lazy to find a link to prove it right now, but the experts tell you that milk is one of those grocery items that is worth paying the premium to get organic. The reason is, as NPR reminds us, that you’re “getting dairy that’s free of synthetic growth hormones, pesticides and antibiotics.” And if cows are getting those things, you’re getting those things. Not so awesome. So, yeah, organic.

But there is a loophole in the organic standards regarding the amount of fresh grass cows that produce organic milk consume, and the government is trying to fix it. From the aforementioned NPR story:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued draft rules that would require cows to be on pasture during the entire grazing season. The regulation would also require that cows on organic dairy farms get a minimum of 30 percent of their diet from grazing. The proposals are intended to close a loophole that has allowed some huge feedlots, with thousands of cows, to sell their milk as organic even though their cows rarely graze on fresh grass.

This would ensure that cows you’re getting your milk from are not only free of things like pesticides, but are actually simply just healthier animals.

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This is old news - certainly older than Jon telling you earlier this month about the Army going green - but the United States Military is the number one purchaser and user of oil in the world. The. Whole. Wide. World.

In fact, NPR told us last year (I told you it was old) that based on the military’s 340,000 barrels of oil it goes through a day,

If the Defense Department were a country, it would rank about 38th in the world for oil consumption, right behind the Philippines.

Let’s do the math, roughly. When oil was at the peak prices of about $150 a barrel…multiply that by 340,000 a day…that is (get ready for it) $18,615,000,000 a year on oil. Now that oil is back down to about $50 a barrel, though, it’s only…let’s see…$6,205,000,000. Six billion dollars a year on gas, alone, for the United States Military. To put that into perspective, with that much money, I could buy enough copies of Michael Jackson’s Thriller to listen to each copy just once, back to back, every minute of every day, for the next 43,586 years.

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In news that can’t be especially surprising:

NPR Interim President & CEO Dennis Haarsager announced plans to reduce 7% of its workforce and cancel two shows, “News & Notes” and “Day to Day” in a memo to staff Wednesday afternoon. The memo outlines NPR’s financial difficulties and explains the rationale for eliminating 64 employees and canceling the two shows. [Huffington Post]

Like I said not surprising, just definitely disappointing.  I can handle buying less and working harder but I don’t the idea that the arts are going to be cut.  NPR is such a integral part of my day (and so many others) and I hate to think of them having to make any more cuts.

takepart to read and listen to all the details of the layoffs and cancellations and also takepart to sponsor NPR - they need your help now!

The light at the end of a very dark tunnel this year for Republicans has been their call to lift the offshore drilling ban.   Mired in the most unpopular Presidential administration in modern history and dogged by outright failures of leadership including the Iraq War, the sinking economy, Katrina, Guantanamo etc. etc. prospects for the GOP looked very, very dim this year unless they found some way, somehow to reinvent themselves.   As luck would have it, that way turned out to be not much of a stretch at all, as Congressional Republicans took back to their familiar tactic of misleading rather than leading the American public over the need to lift the offshore oil drilling ban currently in place in light of record gas prices.

The facts are the facts, despite the spin and bluster that has been floating around.   As noted by Robert Kauffman of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University in a recent interview with National Public Radio, nobody knows how much oil is available in the portions of the continental shelf covered by the drilling ban until they start drilling but the optimistic projections have the number at 19 billion barrels, or slightly over two years worth at present domestic consumption rates.   What we do know for certain however is that in the best of all possible worlds - if drilling started today - not a drop of oil would come out of these areas until at least five years and it would take a decade for full production to come online.

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Dorothea Lange (May 25, 1895 – October 11, 1965), famed Depression-era photographer, has a new book out on her work entitled Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field, written by MIT professor Anne Whiston Spirn. The book looks at Lange’s photographs and includes her own descriptions of the photographs.   Lange was a part of a group called the Farm Security Administration and she, along with others, was sent out to document peoples living conditions in hopes of building public support for government programs. The photographs she returned with were nothing short of amazing - visual keys into the doors of what life was really like.

Is that isn’t media inspiring action, I don’t know what is..

Inspire yourself by listening to NPR and learning about the new book and takepart to read an excerpt from the book. It’s an inspiring story of a woman who as she put it “knew (know) what we could make of it if people only thought we could dare look at ourselves”

Also, more of her work after the jump..

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In the small French town, Salon de Provence (anything from a town by this name has to be awesome, right?!) Chef Dominique Valadier starts his day at fish and farmers markets to get the days produce for the most discerning clientele: 800 high school students.

On the menu: mussels in cream sauce over rice with leeks and stuffed turkey thighs, accompanied by a squash au gratin casserole. ah….pardonnez-moi?

And even better, the ingredients are all fresh, and all local- usually within a 30 mile radius of the school. “Preparation and proximity are the keys to high quality meals at lower prices,” says Valadier.

Perhaps what is most impressive about Valadier’s meals is that they cost the students only $3 a day, less than the typical fast food fare served at many French high schools.

Lunch programs like these have been able to curb childhood obesity rates which for the first time in 2 years have leveled off.   Chef Valadier left the glamorous world of Riviera restaurants to pursue something more meaningful. Investing in students’ well-being is also an act of citizenship, he explains. If young people learn to eat well early on, they will cost the country’s health care system a lot less in the future.

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In yesterday’s Morning Edition radio program, National Public Radio shared a story concerning the business of carbon trading, and another in which a company is developing a plug-in hybrid that gets crazy good gas mileage. Of course, it’s nothing new that National Public Radio is airing stories about progressive causes, but two in one day seems impressive (or, I suppose, excessive, depending with whom you speak). My, that was a lot of “essives.” We move on.

The first story profiles “three young business school grads who are carbon entrepreneurs,” which is a fancy way of saying they are all thirty-ish and work in the carbon trading industry. The story briefly touches on the ethics of carbon trading, an issue oft-overlooked issue, especially in the age in which some countries (no one in particular, of course) claim environmental treaties are biased against countries that already developed industry, say, a hundred plus years ago. You can here by listening to the piece, and perhaps think about the long-term ethical ramifications of creating a carbon trading market in which the end result, by these peoples’ very definitions, ought to be the eradication of their own industry. Or, listen to it, and just be glad someone’s doing something.

The second piece is for those of us that would rather not risk life and limb in order to get great gas mileage. A company has modified a Prius to be a plug-in hybrid which can average 100 miles a gallon, and in one five-mile trip got 340 mpg. It remains to be seen, however, if it’s still impossible to see well out the back window of that thing. You can here and listen to the story.