Monday, April 18, 2011

Reducing Your Foodprint; Farming, Cooking, and Eating for a Healthy Planet

by Ellen Rodger
(2010)
Energy Revolution Series from Crabtree Publishing

My husband loves bananas and I love pineapple! Both fruits require a lot of shipping miles and too many chemicals to grow. As this book explains, our foodprint is calculated by how farming practices and how far food has to travel to get to our table. Knowing this I choose pineapple as a delelicate treat to be savored and not purchased often.  My husband, as a runner, eats bananas everyday.  We do purchase organic when we can but even those have to travel miles and miles to arrive in our fruit bowl in Iowa.  It's tough to consider how we can decrease our foodprint and become more earth-minded with our grocery money.  This book helps to raise awareness.

From the publishers website:
Reducing Your Foodprint teaches children that what they eat and how they eat is important to the environment. Most of the food served in restaurants and stocked on grocery store shelves travels many thousands of miles by airplane and truck. The further food travels, the more harm to the environment. This enlightening new book explains how to eat locally and responsibly. Special case study sections highlight how others have reduced both their carbon foodprints and footprints just by making changes in their diets.



Topics covered include Eco-Awareness, History of Cultivation, Food from Afar, Being an Ecovore, Eating Local, Green Cooking, and Fair Trade Food.  Ecovore, a new term to me, is described as" someone who shops , cooks, and eats with the environment in mind.  It is a term first used by cookbook author Kate Heyhoe to describe someone who makes sustainable food choices that are as environmentally friendly  as possible." (14)  I'm going to add it to my vocabulary and find out more about Kate Keyhoe.

This book could be a great teaching tool but more likely will be used by eco-minded parents to open more awareness.  It would make a great Earth Day gift for a child.  I checked this one out from the library and will look for the other books in the series, Energy Revolution, for my school library.  Crabtree has lesson plans for the series.

To purchase a copy of this perfect book for Earth Day, click on the the title...
Reducing Your Foodprint; Farming, Cooking, and Eating for a Healthy Planet

2 comments:

NatalieSap said...

I went on a field trip to a local nature center with kindergarten today and at one of our stations, a woman talked to us about our farmer's market. She mentioned that it was important to eat locally not only because it supports our farmers but also because the food doesn't have to travel as far so it's better for the environment. That was the long way of saying, "Hey! I just learned that too!" :)

(Diane) Bibliophile By the Sea said...

I think more and more families are getting back to basics. This sounds like a really good book; thanks for reviewing it.