Solar cooking - brrr!

When you have a production schedule to meet, you plan and hope for the best. Today was overcast all morning, chilly, and pretty windy to boot. But Angelina was a great sport, cooking my adapted ratatouille recipe, polenta, and a strawberry-rhubarb crisp for the camera. Fortunately, all three dishes turned out well, with a little extra cooking time.

Thursday we'll tape in the studio, interviewing Solar Cooking International 's board member (and local solar PV business owner) Michael Mora. SCI does serious work with simple cookers in over two dozen countries, bringing life-changing benefits such as reductions in water-borne illness, cleaner indoor air, more time for women and girls to attend school or work rathering than gathering wood, less money spent on firewood for households already living under the poverty line, increased safety for women and girls who would otherwise risk assault while gathering wood outside their villages or refugee camps, and reductions in deforestation. An amazing amount of good from an incredibly simple, affordable, locally-adaptable technology.

Today's food shots will speak to local viewer's stomachs, and the SCI portion to their hearts and minds. All in one half-hour of Bite-size Green TV.

Al Gore at West Coast Green

When I first started this blog, I had just seen An Inconvenient Truth; and I was thinking much more seriously about local food as a route to sustainability. The more I learn, the more I understand that link. And how it fits with community design issues.

Depending on who runs the numbers, our globalized food system accounts for 20-33% of carbon emissions. It runs either 2nd or third, but always in the top three with transportation and buildings (their construction, operation, and eventual disposal). So it makes great sense that Al Gore is headlining this Saturday (Sept 27, 2008) at West Coast Green in San Jose, CA.

Gore will probably focus on energy efficiency, renewable materials, and other key links to carbon emissions that green building practices address. Other speakers - and their are an impressive cadre of them appearing over the conference's 3 days - are more likely to hit on nuances of green building's connections to the food system. Sessions on garden design and ecology, greywater systems, and community design draw the link out, and will help attendees think about issues like how to create food security as a factor when we design personal living spaces and community commons.