Organic Food Lover

Green LA Girl writes about her trip to the Interim Cafe in Santa Monica. The good thing about his cafe is they serve organic and fair trade coffe:

In general, the restaurant has a very open, chilled-out feel. You get to pick from a very vegetarian and vegan friendly menu when you order at the counter, then stake out a table either inside or outside. Plus, the coffee here’s all organicand fair trade

Nice people, fast and friendly service, yummy food, more than reasonable prices: It’s enough to make me wanna eat there every day.

Interim Cafe. 530 Wilshire Blvd. Santa Monica.

Leave a comment if you'd like to add your review.

DIY Happy has a post on creating your own compost:

Here’s an environmentally-friendly project. A compost heap can be beneficial in a number of ways, not just to gardeners and freaky organic homesteaders who live off the “fatta the land”. It can be used to as a heater, food for a worm farm, and it’s always good to reduce the amount of junk we pile into landfills and other large piles of waste

Composts are a fantastic way to recycle your leftover food scraps and any organic materials. You could also try creating a worm farm:

If you want a natural and organic fertiliser or soil conditioner for you garden then you can’t beat worm castings. It’s the easiest way to have a successful organic garden. Worm castings are rich in soil nutrients. They significantly improve the soil structure as well as increasing its water holding capacity. Regular use of worm castings in your garden will result in stronger, healthier, more drought resistant plants.

For best results, worm castings, or worm compost, should be placed around plants and then covered by mulch. Worm castings can also be mixed with water to produce a liquid fertiliser which works well when sprayed on flowers or vegetables during their growing season.

Compost and worm castings are a fantastic way to fertilise an organic garden so you can grow your own organic food. That's the only way to get really fresh fruit and vegetables, if you ask me. I love gardening so am happy to spend time growing my own stuff but even if you aren't that interested you can at least grow a few organic herbs on your windowsill. Give it a go because herbs at so much flavour to a meal - they really make a difference.

What a great way to cook your organic barbeque - using a solar powered grill:

The Solar Grill cooks your grub with, as you guessed, the sun’s energy.  This New Age BBQ has a flexible mirror, which focuses the sun beams on the barbecue cup allowing it to heat up and cook your food without burning it. No word on how long it actually takes to cook your (organic) steak.

It looks great too so would be a great addition to an organic and eco friendly garden. Gather your friends around and cook some organic meat, chicken, veges, whatever you like on this BBQ.

Tim Worstall discusses some dodgy practices going on in farmers' markets in Britain:

Consider, for example, Isle of Wight Tomatoes, one of the most established stallholders at London’s numerous farmers’ markets. It looks like a small, traditional enterprise and claims to sell its own homegrown produce. Think again. Its tomatoes, aubergines and cucumbers are bought from a separate company, Wight Salads, the bulk of whose £60m turnover comes from supplying supermarket chains.

Worse, as far as many green consumers may be concerned, many of the tomatoes are actually experimental genetic crossbreeds that Wight Salads is engineering to try to find the “next best thing” for the supermarkets. In short, these tomatoes are a far cry from traditional British produce homegrown in a smallholding.

It’s a very good business. Nonorganic cherry tomatoes bought from Isle of Wight Tomatoes and weighing 455g (16oz) fetch £3.50 at the Pimlico farmers’ market stall. At Tesco you can pick up the equivalent weight oforganiccherry tomatoes for £1.78. Ordinary tomatoes like the ones The Sunday Times bought from the market cost even less and the equivalent weight can be bought at Tesco for £1.26.

I hope this kind of thing isn't standard practice, although I'm not surprised that this goes on, but I am definitely disappointed to hear about it.

I'm not a health fanatic or manic greeny but I do prefer to eat natural and organic food. The thought of pesticides and other chemical residues accumulating in my body is what turned me to organic food in the first place.

Although the quantity of pesticides absorbed from eating non-organic food is very small, they do accumulate over time. Pesticides absorbed from food are linked to many health problems including cancer, birth defects, genetic mutation, asthma, and nerve damage.

Then when I read about the damage conventional farming practices do to the environment and, more importantly, to farm workers, then I converted to organic food for good.

This quote is related to growing organic cotton but the same goes for fruit and vegetable growing:

Cotton is one of the most widely grown crops in the world and one of the most devastating to the environment. Around 25% of all insecticide sales are used on crops on non-organic cotton farms. The run off from these farms have destroyed ecosystems such as those in the Aral Sea and is having a serious impact on water supplies in many parts of the world including the Murray-Darling basin in Australia.

Using chemical pesticides on crops kills beneficial organisms in the soil which leads to soil degradation which in turn leads to the need to add chemical fertilisers. The use of pesticides also leads to more pests as they become resistant to these chemicals. Farming a single crop such as cotton leads to less wildlife, especially birds, which again results in more pests. Farms which continue to use these chemicals will become unsustainable in the future.

So I hope you'll join me in my adventure to find the best organic food around!