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March 16, 2015

The (grim? hopeful?) future of small-scale farming in 2015

March 16, 2015/ Kelly Pemberton

This year’s news for small farmers is a sobering reminder that there is still a long way to go to achieving a real, sustainable “movement” that could also help small-scale farmers. According to a report released last month by the US Department of Agriculture, farmers’ incomes are projected to drop by as much as 34% in 2015 as compared to the 2014 forecast. In this grim scenario, the Northern Crescent region of the U.S. is expected to be hardest hit. Some of the reasons for this decline are lower crop yields, lower crop prices and higher costs of doing business.

Despite the ongoing challenges small-scale farmers face, there are some encouraging reasons to pay attention to small-scale farming in 2015, and to understand its importance for the (local and global) economy, the environment, and for reducing your exposure to toxins in the food you and your children consume, whether or not you patronize your local farms.

August 22, 2014

What you can do about Climate Change

August 22, 2014/ Kelly Pemberton

The July 3rd post featured my interview with Moms Clean Air Force National Field Manager Gretchen Dahlkemper-Alfonso. This week’s post continues the conversation about the climate change agenda, drawing on information from that interview and from recent studies that suggest that that time for sounding the warning bell is over: now is the time for taking action.

Taking action on climate change is not just something for policy makers and governments to tackle: there are things you can do, too. So we end this post with a list of 6 things you can do to take action on global climate change problems. But before we get to that it’s important to understand something about why action now is so crucial, and so timely…

July 03, 2014

Everybody’s talking clean air and climate change again

July 03, 2014/ Kelly Pemberton

By many accounts, more so than ever before, climate change today is the biggest environmental issue of our time. No one in this world is unaffected by it, and it has not only environmental consequences, but also economic, political, and social ones.

Whatever the reasons, people are beginning to listen to the chorus of voices that have been pushing for the US to get serious about climate change. One of these voices belongs to Gretchen Dahlkemper-Alfonso, who I interviewed this past June. We talked about changes in the everyday awareness of people about environmental management in general and climate change in particular, why climate change is the biggest environmental challenge of our time, and what ordinary people can do to address it, when so many our political leaders here in the US seem unable or unwilling to get serious about passing substantive legislation that will deal with climate change and the things that are driving it.

May 11, 2014

The importance of eating local

May 11, 2014/ Kelly Pemberton

When you eat fruits and vegetables that are in season, there is less of a need for the farmers who grow those crops to use pesticides on them. Locally produced and distributed fruits and vegetables are growing at a time when they would normally grow, and consequently, farmers don’t have to over-protect them. There are many other good reasons to eat locally. Six of them are the topics of this post:

March 06, 2014

Does eating tilapia lead to heart disease?

March 06, 2014/ Kelly Pemberton

Should you eat tilapia?

We all know that eating a Mediterranean diet leads to a longer, healthier life. A big part of this diet is fish.

Not all fish are created equal, though. In fact, some doctors have claimed that eating certain kinds of fish may be worse than eating a slab of pork bacon, a box of doughnuts, or a fat, juicy hamburger!

What determines whether any particular kind of fish is good or bad for your health depends on a number of factors...

February 22, 2014

The Chemicals We Don’t Know: is West VA’s Chemical Spill Just The Tip Of The Iceberg?

February 22, 2014/ Kelly Pemberton

Five and a half weeks after a chemical spill in West VA and we still don’t know much about the chemical, Crude MCHM, that has alarmed officials in the state and increasingly, across the country. What little we do know gives a false sense of security: used to process coal, MCHM is made up almost entirely of the chemical called 4-methylcyclohexanemethol. It is listed in the Toxnet chemical database of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a skin, eye, and respiratory system irritant. The CDC conducted a study that recommended 1ppm (part per million) for safe levels of MCHM in drinking water (as of a week ago, the group Appalachian Voices’ Appalachian Water Watch reported that levels of MCHM just near the site of the spill was 1.130 ppm).

This recommendation, and the implication that it MCHM is now undergoing intense evaluation, may be giving some people a false sense of security...

February 06, 2014

A cheaper green? How to shop for healthy and eco-friendly products on a budget

February 06, 2014/ Kelly Pemberton

A couple of weeks ago I was shopping at Whole Foods and noticed that the person in the aisle next to me had a shopping cart full of items. In fact, while wandering through the store looking for a marinade I used to use years ago, apparently no longer sold by Whole Foods (maybe too overpriced?), I noticed quite a few people with shopping carts full. None of them seemed to be to be the type of people who had money to burn. Now looks alone are no judge, but I wondered, how the heck can people afford to do so much of their grocery shopping at Whole Foods? Very few of the people I Having joked with the staff on many occasions about how it was impossible to get out of the store for under $30, I was pretty surprised to see more than a handful of people buying what struck me as hundreds of dollars’ worth of groceries.

There are cheaper options than Whole Foods, of course.

January 31, 2014

The controversy over organic

January 31, 2014/ Kelly Pemberton

Last week I shopped at Costco, as I do about twice a month. What was different this time was that upon entering the warehouse and showing my ID, I was handed a brochure advertising Costco’s latest organic offerings. I was curious: there seemed to be a lot more organic goods than I remembered, and some of the items I had been shopping for had disappeared from the store shelves, replaced by these new, supposedly healthier, products. If I sound a little skeptical it is because I am inherently more distrustful of organic products offered by big box stores, especially their own organic brands, than of organic products made by my local organic farmer, or sold by the small, local health-conscious stores where I’ve shopped for organic products for years. (Still, this skepticism hasn’t always prevented me from buying Safeway’s O-organics brand or more recently, Costco’s organic offerings.)

Browsing Costco’s “Save on organic at your local Costco” brochure did make me wonder, though, why some stores seem to be increasing their organic foods inventory.

January 24, 2014

The Body Burden: why kids, older adults, and overweight people are more vulnerable

January 24, 2014/ Kelly Pemberton

(This is part of a series of posts based on interviews with Loni Mc Collin, MScCN, Clinical Herbalist and Nutritionist at Knowles Apothecary in Kensington, MD. You can find more information about Loni and her work, or schedule a consultation, through her website, www.lonimccollin.com)

As Loni noted in our interview, the Body Burden refers to the amount of chemicals that have accumulated within the adipose tissue and the fat tissue or in the body’s organs. Chapter 2 of my e-book, The Little Guidebook for Green Moms & Dads: how daily exposure to chemical toxins is hurting your kids (and what you can do about it) has more information about the body burden and how it affects the health of children (and adults). Because many of the toxic chemicals we are exposed to accumulate in fatty tissue, decreasing exposure is especially a concern with children.

January 22, 2014

Indoor pollution: how to protect yourself this winter

January 22, 2014/ Kelly Pemberton

In the hard winter months we bundle up and stay indoors more often. We rarely air out our homes, although we should do this even when it is cold outside. These are just a couple of the reasons why we’re more likely to get sick in winter – germs thrive best in closed spaces. There’s another reason why we get sick more in winter that you may not have thought about, and it has to do with the kind of long-term, often subtle illnesses that result from exposure to indoor pollutants. Winter is the time of year when our body burden can increase the most.