Jammin' Endeavours

One of my summer activities that is frugal and happens to be relatively green is canning. I tend to mostly make jam, but I've also made my own applesauce, conserve, syrup and chutney, all properly heat-treated and shelf-stable.

There are few ingredients to these things, and most of them are fairly thrifty and sustainable. Many of them I got from my own yard or local farms.

What I actually bought:

• 1 dozen half-pint jars (~$9, reusable!)
• Extra Lids ($3, reusable, but not for heat treating.)
• Extra Rings and Lids ($7, reusable! Until they rust.)
• 11 lbs Strawberries from Boxx Berry Farms (~$1.5/lb)
• 11 lbs raspberries from Bjornstad Farms (~$1.35/lb)
• 2 10 lb. bags of white sugar (~$8)
• 3 lemons ($3)
• 2 oranges (~$2)
• Walnuts and raisins(??)

What I did not buy:

• Several pounds of transparent apples.
• 5 lbs Italian plums
• Lots and lots of blackberries
• A big bundle of spearmint.
• More than a dozen pint/pint 1/2 jars, found on the side of the road during student moving season. =)

The results?

This doesn't include the half-dozen jars I've already given away or eaten.

• 4 pint and a half  jars of completely natural, local applesauce.
• Three pint jars of plum conserve
• Several half-pint jars each of strawberry jam, strawberry-raspberry jam, raspberry-orange jam, and lightly seeded blackberry jam.
• Two jars of mint syrup (which later needed to be watered down and made about 5 pints of syrup.)

 All made without artificial flavors or pectin, with the important ingredients coming from a 25-mile radius from my house. They make great gifts and keep so well that I'm eating though a couple of years worth of jam, and the jars can be reused for more jam, for leftovers, for random storage items. I use my leftover jars as portable coffee cups, yogurt parfait containers, as a pill container and as a toothbrush holder. until I need them for canning again.

So, in conclusion, canning your own food can be thrifty (after an investment in supplies) it encourages local shopping and saves the transportation cost of whatever kinds of foods you would normally buy at the grocery store. And you end up with a taste of summer when you crack open that jar of raspberry jam in the dead of winter.

Sustainable Seafood

Fast Company: Whole Foods Implement Seafood Color-Coded Rating System

This article talks about the new initiative Whole Foods has rolled out: labeling all of their seafood with sustainability ratings, with plans to phase out their "red-listed" or unsustainably harvested seafood by 2012.

 It is also an excellent example of the company taking responsibility instead of the consumer: it is possible to find out which kinds of fish in your area are or aren't sustainable or overfished, but its even easier for the company to research and educate their customer base about these kinds of issues, and then use thier pwer to negotiate with suppliers and eventually, lower the demand for these products.

This is something I would love to see implemented everywhere. At the moment, I only know of a few kinds of fish that are sustainable: farm-raised rainbow trout or catfish, which are both breeds that have low food conversion ratios and do well in inland pond environments, and Alaskan salmon and Nova Scotian lobster, both of which are well-managed and regulated industries.

Fortunately, a quick google takes me to the Monterey Bay Aqaurium website, which has a not only information on the issue of sustainable seafood, but also a set of pocket guides available to print out, varying by region of the United States, with the same rating scale that they developed for Whole Foods. Print one out and take it with you shopping!

*for anyone who needs ideas and article to write about, check out Fast Company's website and click the "Ethonomics" tab. A whole section devoted to sustainable and ethical articles!