Walking the Earth Day Walk: Jane Goodall and Lauren Sweeney
Plus: home-alone fish and peppers, a great mess of greens, and an absolutely outstanding cookbook
Hello, Wednesday pals!
Earth Day, as you probably know, is April 22, and to reflect that, we’re rerunning our episode of Food with Mark Bittman with the one and only Jane Goodall, but we’re also introducing you to—in a separate, shorter interview—the inspiring Lauren Sweeney, the CEO and co-founder of DeliverZero, a network of returnable, reusable food containers.
Lauren is a working single mom, who often relies on the convenience of takeout and delivery, and as she became increasingly frustrated by how much waste came with each delivery—and questioned whether she could really recycle or compost the single use containers she received—she set out on a mission to make reuse easier and more transparent than recycling. She’s terrific, and working with a great idea.
“I think that when my seven-year-old daughter is an adult, the idea that we would ever use packaging one time and then just send it out into the ether is going to seem so weird; it will seem like smoking on an airplane.” — Lauren Sweeney
And Jane Goodall—I mean, come on, I can’t introduce her. So I’ll do it, instead, with a quote from our interview.
I also want to mention here that if you’re in the mood for donating on Earth Day (or any day), the people I donate most frequently to are called HEAL Food Alliance; they are working on food, labor, agriculture, and the environment, so more bang for your buck.
The recipe from today’s episode, Stir-Fried Beans with Asparagus or Broccoli, from Food Matters, is below. And recipes from the Jane Goodall Institute, Grilled Squash and Orzo Salad with Pine Nuts, and Pan-Seared Cauliflower with Garlic and Capers, can be found here.
Your weekly Marksisms, below. Thanks, as always —
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This Week’s Marksisms
A Good Greens Problem
That picture of all that stuff on my counter? That’s this week’s Glynwood CSA share. The accumulation of root vegetables has slowed, and probably they’ll all get used in the next few weeks, but the onslaught of greens just began a few weeks ago, and this week it reached a breaking point. I’m dutifully eating a giant greens-only salad every day, and some of the flowering brassicas are irresistible, but there’s only so much you can do.
So yesterday (I’m writing this, as I do, on Sunday), I cleaned the fridge of all cooking greens, from kale to flowering mustard to bok choy to old white cabbage that refused to go bad (what a vegetable) to “stir-fry mixtures” of every damned thing, and I filled up the container of a pressure cooker to about the three-quarters point with those (washed, of course), along with about a cup of water and a big pinch of salt and a sole poblano chile that had been sitting there forlornly (and which I cut into strips) plus a few cloves of garlic, and I pressure cooked that for ten minutes, and then I cooked out the remaining water and added a little more oil and some lemon and look how beautiful it is, even with my sorry “presentation.” (We can call this “horta” if we want to be fancy, or “mess of greens.”) I’ve already eaten two bowlfuls and I’m confident I can get through it all, what with friends coming over tonight and all. It’s just going to start again, but this is a “problem” of abundance and I’m happy to have it.