Shopping In-Season

Photo by Roberto Giannicola found here.

The benefits of shopping (and eating) in-season are too numerous to count. Some of the more obvious reasons for buying local fare in its prime include snatching up the tastiest food around and preparing dishes that will leave your taste-buds and your wallet smiling. But there are many less-salient reasons to shop for local, in-season produce, such as increasing the nutritional value of each item you purchase and decreasing your carbon footprint (ever think about the ecological impact of your Chilean fruit salad?).  

Of course, eating locally and in-season is a lot easier when you have a tool to tell you what is ready for feasting upon in your area. Today I discovered Epicurious.com's Peak-Season Map and I immediately saved the webpage to my favorites. The tool is simple to use and allows you to select the month and the state you live in to see a list of produce ripe for the picking. You can find the map here.  

Photo via Crop and Soil

April means slow growing for us in Colorado, but it is a great time for baked potatoes and apple snacks. I am already getting excited for May to hit for asparagus season!  One more month should also give me just enough time to find a suitable vegan rhubarb crumble recipe...

A Discussion of Sustainable Viability

We had a two-hour long discussion in my Creating Sustainable Enterprise class today about whether or not sustainability is good for business.  As our professor facilitated the exchange of endless information regarding how a company's bottom line is affected by the nebulous buzzword that is "sustainability", my mood quickly deflated from excitement to something resembling hopelessness.  

We have had this same discussion for the past three quarters.  At one point I was confident that I would eventually learn how businesses create sustainable models, but I am losing faith that the discussion will ever reach that point.  

The issue of sustainability is one I find incredibly interesting and challenging.  It is a topic I look forward to writing about more in the near future. For now, however, the words of E. O. Wilson, one of my favorite authors and theorists, will have to do.  After four years of drowning in business information, statistics, and industry reviews, I could really use some good old fashioned wisdom.