A Greener World…One Garden at a Time
06.10.10
Congratulations to Peter Brown for winning the E. B. White Read Aloud Award for picture books. The award honors the read aloud standards created by White’s classics like Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little.
It’s our favorite children’s book from 2009, and our best-seller for young and old. Customers light up when they first discover it. They cradle it, and smile as they reach the end.
Inspired by a garden in NYC, the book is about a boy who discovers a struggling garden of weeds and transforms it—along with the glum gray city—into a lush, green world.
Story and illustrations are beautiful, whimsical and magical.
It’s a wonderful read aloud for all ages.
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Liam may not have been a gardener, but he knew that he could help. So he returned to the railway the very next day and got to work. The flowers nearly drowned and he had a few pruning problems, but the plants patiently waited while Liam found better ways of gardening.
”
The Story of Stuff on Earth Day’s 40th
04.12.10
April 22 is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. Recently, I went to hear Annie Leonard speak on The Story of Stuff, her immensely popular web video that’s just been published as a book. She reminded all of us gathered at Seattle’s Town Hall that we cannot spend our way to sustainability.
Our consumer society may tell us the solution is to buy, buy, buy green, but a better way is to “reduce, reuse, recycle.”
She also said we cannot address sustainability issues individually—that’s just acting on our citizen’s duty—rather, we must work as a community to address larger systematic issues.
As an analogy, she told us that shopping responsibly will make us a better swimmer, but we’re still swimming against the current of waste and pollution, and we must instead tackle the problem upstream.
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I want to start by challenging the fear of sacrifice and describing one version of what life can look like when we focus on the quality of our life, rather than the quantity of our Stuff.
”
Celebrating Diversity and Food Literacy
04.08.10
Our goal is to promote food literacy in a culturally inclusive way, by featuring books about foods from different cultures or reaching out to diverse communities to create a better understanding of what we eat and where our food comes from.
And so we want to highlight April 30th as El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Children’s Day/Book Day), promoting the importance of literacy for children of all linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
One book that’s perfect for Dia is Pat Mora’s Yum! MMMM! Que Rico!: Americas’ Sproutings, a delightful collection of haiku about familiar (and a few unfamiliar) foods native to the Americas.
These poems capture the enduring appeal of foods that have been part of the diverse cuisines of the Americas for centuries. Muralist, Rafael López, brings the playful energy of the haiku to life.
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Blueberries, cranberries, prickly pear fiesta,
Tomatoes, chile, corn; spicy, spicy salsa.
Lime for papaya, cream for pumpkin, butter for potato
Yum! Vanilla! Peanuts! Chocolate. ¡Mmmm! ¡Qué rico!
”
The Poetry of Farming
04.01.10
April is National Poetry Month, the perfect time to pick up one of the many works by Wendell Berry, farmer, writer, educator, and poet. He has been writing and farming on his Kentucky farm since 1965.
Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food is a wonderful new collection of his essays from the last 30 years. Michael Pollan notes, “to read the essays in this sparkling anthology, many of them dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, is to realize just how little of what we are saying and hearing today Wendell Berry hasn’t already said, bracingly, before.”
Less well known is Berry’s poetry. Like his other work, Berry writes with clarity and passion about the beauty of the land and the importance of family and community. The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry gathers together his most personal, honest, and heartfelt reflections.
The New York Times Book Review writes, “[Berry's] straightforward search for a life connected to the soil, for marriage as a sacrament…affirms a style that is resonant with the authentic….He can be said to have returned American poetry to a Wordsworthian clarity of purpose.”
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Put your hands
Into the earth. Live close
To the ground. Learn the darkness.
Gather round you all
The things that you love, name
Their names, prepare
To lose them. It will be
As if all you know were turned
Around within your body….
”
(from Song in a Year of Catastrophe)
Get Cooking: 150 Simple Recipes to Get You Started in the Kitchen
