Sex, Food and Saving Money? It Must Be EcoStiletto’s Book Club!
April 10 2010
Thank god Earth Day is every day at EcoStiletto, because we’re going to need 365 of them to read all the amazing sustainably-minded books that just came out. From small lifestyle changes, to the new eco-teen scene to ultra-easy organic cooking (complete with composting tips)—there’s something for everyone in this fresh crop of green reads.
Conscious Cooking
Forget Kermit. With Anna Getty’s Easy Green Organic (Chronicle Books, 2010) as your guide, it is easy being—and grocery shopping and cooking and, best of all, eating—green.
Before we even got to the droolfully divine recipes, Getty got us all geared up with practical tips on greening our kitchen, decoding common packaging labels and composting our kitchen scraps—which, in her emphatic words, are “not garbage” but “a banquet loaded with life-sustaining food that the microorganisms in your composter will just love to get a hold of.” Take that, trash man.
Then there are those recipes we mentioned earlier. Amazing. No steamed tofu or bland broths here, baby. We’re talking Baked Portobello Mushrooms with Avocado and Pesto (p. 150). Seared Bay Scallops with Orzo and Sun-Dried Tomato Cream Sauce (p. 163). And to satisfy a sweet tooth, Espresso Chocolate Pudding Cake (p. 225). (C’mon, chocolate, pudding and cake, all in the same dessert? Someone’s got our number.)
Recipes this mouth-watering must be complicated, right? Wrong. Many of Getty’s recipes can be made in minutes, and require little more than a knife and a pot or pan to prepare. (Which is great, because that’s pretty much what we’ve got in our now much more eco-friendly kitchen after tossing out the Teflon.)
Beautifully photographed and impeccably laid out, Getty’s green-cooking bible had us convinced we could cook well, eat better and sustain the planet while doing it. And you know what? She was right.
WEEK OF 6.28 SIX ECOSTILETTO MEMBERS WILL EACH WIN A $14 COPY OF ANNA GETTY’S EASY GREEN ORGANIC!
Badass Girls, Goodass Deeds
Inspired by her work on Nobel laureate Al Gore’s eco-opus, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Hollywood exec and children’s book author Lynn Hirshfield puts young ecoistas in the spotlight with Girls Gone Green (Puffin, February 2010).
Whether you happen to be a teenager or just act like one, Hirshfield’s collection of real-life stories from young women who have made a difference in their environment is inspirational, exciting and way fun to read.
Take the tale of 17-year-old Erin Schrode, who got so disgusted with the glut of yuck in all those cosmetics she’d started using at age 13, that she started an organization—Teens for Safe Cosmetics (now Teens Turning Green)—and fought backlash from the beauty products lobby to rally her peers to the cause of safe, eco-friendly personal care products.
Or Rebecca Chan, also 17, whose dedication to rainforest protection started with a school report and led her to Costa Rica, the co-presidency of her school’s rainforest conservation club and, ultimately, a presentation at 2008’s G8 Summit in Japan, as a designated California Climate Champion.
Hirshfield’s book abounds with stories like these, along with eco advice from young celebs like Alicia Silverstone, Mischa Barton and Hayden Panettiere, who penned the forward.
Don’t forget—2010 graduations are coming up. Can you think of a better gift for the aspiring ecoista in your life? We can’t.
Everyday Green
Elizabeth Rogers, co-author of New York Times bestseller The Green Book (Three Rivers Press, June 2007) has done it again. Her brand-new book, Shift Your Habit: Easy Ways to Save Money, Simplify Your Life, and Save the Planet (Three Rivers Press, March 2010) continues her crusade to get ordinary folks to (subtly) change their behavior in ways that can add up to thousands of dollars in annual savings while conserving resources and reducing environmental impact.
Rogers shuffles her suggested “shifts” into categories we can all get with, including Beauty (“buy a bar of soap instead of a plastic bottle of body wash”), Heating and Cooling (“try an Energy Star-qualified air conditioner instead of a conventional unit”) and Crafts and Activities (“make your own Play-Doh instead of buying the name-brand stuff”), which detail dollars saved and resources conserved, and include instructions, recipes and purchasing advice.
Ease-fiends that we are, we’re especially enamored of Rogers’ handy at-a-glance charts on everything from making homemade cleaners to buying gently used baby essentials. Rogers also includes profiles of 15 actual “shifter” families, who, with a little advice from the author herself, picked and chose the best changes for their individual lives, and collectively saved $100,000 and 500,000 gallons of water, plus diverted 25,000 tons of waste from the landfill. See? Like we always tell you, those itty bitty changes really do add up.
We love that this well-organized book points out the connection between spending less and doing more for the planet—a nice alternative to the mistaken notion that it takes a lot of green to go there.
WEEK OF 7.12 EIGHT ECOSTILETTO MEMBERS WILL EACH WIN A $14 COPY OF SHIFT YOUR HABIT!
Another of our picks in the “small changes, big impact” category, Green My Parents (Brand Neutral, April 2010) puts kids in charge of the save-cash-while-saving-the-planet program. What we dig most about this book, and its accompanying website, is how it draws a connection between major environmental crises and how families live their lives every single day.
What kids will think is cool is being in the driver seat for once, with “eco-assignments” they give their parents, along with “report cards” to monitor mom and dad’s planet-saving progress.
Bear in mind this is a hefty, info-filled book, and not every kid is going to embrace the challenge of reading its instructional chapters, let alone the task of holding parents accountable for installing lamp timers and sensors, doing calculations based on odometer readings and vehicle pink slip information, or maintaining family fuel receipts.
That said, for the right kind of kid (the kind, say, who might get a page or two in Girls Gone Green) this is the right kind of book—savvy, hip and never, ever patronizing.
WEEK 7.5 OF EIGHT ECOSTILETTO MEMBERS WILL EACH WIN A $16.99 COPY OF GREEN MY PARENTS!
Green Between the Sheets
Sex: It’s the most natural thing on Earth. Except that these days, it’s not, especially when you factor in non-biodegradable latex condoms, paraben-laden lubes and potential environmental hormone contamination caused by discarded birth-control pills. And what about that lingerie we’re wearing? Or those sex toys we’ve got socked away in our sock drawers? Or those aphrodisiac lotions and potions we’re imbibing and anointing one another with? Just how green are they? It’s questions like these, and solutions to the problems inherent in their answers, that are at the heart of Eco-Sex: Go Green Between the Sheets and make Your Love Life Sustainable (Ten Speed Press, April 2010) by Stefanie Iris Weiss. The author of nine books on topics including yoga, veganism and the beauty myth, Weiss fills Eco-Sex with input from pros ranging from celebrity chefs (offering seductive vegan and raw recipes) to botanical perfumers (serving up recipes for DIY libido-stimulating scents), plus her own wisdom on sex-related topics from green dating to tantra to the environmental impact of overpopulation. Bring it on.
WEEK OF 7.19 SIX ECOSTILETTO MEMBERS WILL EACH WIN A $14 COPY OF ECO-SEX!
