My book club decided to read Harvest for Hope by Jane Goodall recently and I was somewhat afraid it wouldn’t have too much new information for me that I didn’t already read about in Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, or Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  But I was surprised that there is still a lot about our current food environment that I don’t know.  The book is actually only partially written by Jane Goodall, if you aren’t familiar with her, she is the woman famous for living with and studying chimpanzees in Africa.  The book has two other contributing writers and  at times it does read like it has multiple authors.  The tone of the work is inconsistent and it doesn’t always flow together in a natural way, there are also things repeated in the book multiple times as if it is the first time they are mentioned.

The book has brief overviews on a lot of different interesting topics.  I was actually glad I’d already read some of the other books on this subject because I felt at times like Harvest for Hope assumed you had a good understanding of things and brushed over the details on several of the topics. On the other hand, this book did introduce me to several topics I had not thought much about previously, one of which being the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in our food today.  While the book gave a pretty good overview of GMOs, it definitely left me wanting to find out more for myself.

Overall, I would start with other books if you haven’t read much on this subject, but if you have already read Omnviore’s Dilemma and others like it and want a brief overview on GMO’s, water quality, the impact of fishing on the environment or some of the other subjects she discusses, it might be worth picking up.  The book also has a pretty extensive list of resources in the back that I found helpful to find out more information.

P. S. Sorry for the lack of posts this week, I was out of town all weekend and got back Sunday night.  And now our baby has a cold and an ear infection!

We have been trying several different brands of green dishwashing detergent to find the brands that work best for us and have the least impact on the environment. By green we mean a phosphate-free dishwashing detergent. The majority of normal detergents contain phosphates such as Sodium Tripolyphosphate or STPP. Phosphates aren’t inherently bad and in fact phosphates are in many everyday products . Phosphates are even used in fertilizers, it’s the 2nd number in the 0-0-0 convention, which is where the problem arises. When the levels of phosphates in lakes and streams are increased unnaturally it can lead to rapid growth of algae. Truhugger has a great article that explains phosphates and their impact in more detail.

It’s a pretty easy and not terribly expensive exercise in becoming green to move to phosphate free dishwashing detergents, but which one to choose? After testing several complete bottles of each we have found that the performance of Palmolive Eco is much better than Seventh Generation. Towards the end of our second bottle of Seventh Generation I began actively complaining about the quality of our glasses. Unless you thoroughly pre-rinsed the glass after our breakfast shake it would leave little strawberry seeds stuck all over the glass. When you fill a clean glass with milk and look down to see nasty dark spots covering your glass, it’s pretty hard to continue to drink it. Overall it did a poor job cleaning our dishes. However, Palmolive Eco works nearly as good as the previous dishwashing detergent that had phosphates. If you decide to try out a phosphate-free detergent I highly recommend Palmolive Eco.