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Earlier today, Chris listed the 10 most common GMO foods, and USDA is close to adding one more to that list: GM potatoes.

I just received an alert from Food & Water Watch explaining that McDonald's is the world's #1 potato buyer, which means that if they refuse to buy GMO potatoes, farmers won't plant them. Jo Miles said in this afternoon's press release:

"You may not like McDonald's. I'll be honest: I haven't eaten there since I was a kid. But thanks to their famous fries, McDonald's is the single largest purchaser of potatoes in the United States. That's why we're calling on them right now, before the GE potato is even approved, to commit that they won't buy it."

Sure, you can avoid GE potatoes if they get approved by buying organic, but we've seen over and over that GMO crops cross-breed with conventional and even organic crops, contaminating them and sometimes even hurting trade with other countries who have bans or regulations on GMOs.

Want to stop GM potatoes in their tracks? Tell McDonald's that you won't buy genetically modified fries. Food & Water Watch has an online petition that makes it easy to join the ranks of consumers saying no to GM potatoes.

Image Credits: Creative Commons fries photo by hildaaa and McFrankenfries image via Food & Water Watch

It is now officially beach season – the perfect opportunity to personalize your summer beach rental – or your weekend getaway – with a vintage-looking original sign created by an artist on reclaimed wood. We always support creating home furnishings and new pieces from eco-friendly salvaged wood and materials – saving trees and keeping valuable raw materials out of the local landfill.

These weathered-looking signs come complete with a ‘beachy' vibe and look like they're as old as the sea – in reality they have been custom-created from reclaimed lumber to add that touch of character and authenticity every beach shack, or waterfront palace, needs. The distressed character of the graphics blends beautifully with the inherent beat-up quality of the reclaimed wood – the perfect canvas for this kind of thing.

Designer and artist, Christina, of Mango Seed also makes wedding signs, prints and a variety of home decor items in her distinctive vintage distressed style – all on beautifully distressed reclaimed wood.

Each item is handmade in North Carolina and designed to reflect the rustic artistry, old-world craftsmanship and relationship to the environment that went into their creation. The custom signs retail for $35 and up @ Mango Seed.

Genetically modified organisms, such as plants and livestock are already found in our supermarkets. GM plants are much more common than many people realize too. Here is a list of the 10 most common GMO foods so you can be more aware while grocery shopping.

Up to 90% of soybeans in the market have been genetically modified to be naturally resistant to an herbicide called, Round Up. This increased resistance to the herbicide allows farmers to use more Round Up to kill weeds. However, this results not only in a genetically modified food product, but also a food product loaded with more chemicals.

Half of the US farms growing corn to sell to the conglomerate, Monsanto, are growing GMO corn. Most of this corn is going to be used for human consumption. Genetically modified corn has been linked to health problems, including weight gain and organ disruption.

Canola oil is derived from rapeseed oil. It is considered one of the most chemically altered oils sold in the US.

Even cotton has been genetically modified to increase yield and resistance to disease. Most concern relates to the cotton oil. Cotton originating from India, and China, in particular, is considered higher risk for personal health.

One fifth of the dairy cows in the United States have been given growth hormones to help them grow faster and increase their yield. These hormones can be found in some of the milk produced by these cows. These growth hormones have been shown to act inside the human body.

Genetically modified sugar beets were introduced to the US market in 2009. These sugar beets are modified to resist Roundup, like corn.

Aspartame is an artificial sweetener used instead of sugar by many people. There is some question concerning the the safety of aspartame in the body, including its possible link to certain cancers. Aspartame is manufactured from genetically modified bacteria.

Genetically modified zucchini contains a toxic protein that helps make it more resistant to insects. This introduced insecticide, has recently been found in human blood, including that of pregnant women and fetuses. This indicates that some of the insecticide is making its way into our bodies rather than being broken down and excreted.

Yellow squash has also been modified with the toxic proteins to make it insect resistant. This plant is very similar to zucchini, and both have also been modified to resist viruses.

Genetically modified papaya trees have been grown in Hawaii since 1999. These Papayas are sold in the United States and Canada for human consumption. These papayas have been modified to be naturally resistant to Papaya Ringspot virus, and also to delay the maturity of the fruit. Delaying maturity gives suppliers more time to ship the fruit to supermarkets.

These are just 10 of the most prevalent GMO foods found in the supermarket. There are many others currently for sale and being grown for the market. GMO safety is not yet certain, so if you want to stay away from it always keep an eye out for a label that indicates food is organic or non-GMO.

Image credit:  Some rights reserved by KevinLallier

Building a eco-conscious lifestyle begins at home. While we might invest in organic and whole foods, furniture built from recycled material, and citywide recycling programs, it is important to evaluate the way we operate our homes and our impact on the environment.

By making smarter choices in our household operations we contribute to a greener world. As an added benefit with often increase our personal health and de-clutter our lives. While eco-friendly choices are not always the easiest to make, they are always the right choices to make.

Decrease Meat Consumption You can eat eco-friendly by decreasing meat consumption. If you already live a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, great! If not, consider going meatless a few days a week or as Mark Bittman suggests: be vegan until 6pm. While animal muscle meats provide necessary proteins and vitamins, animal farming practices often cause major damage to the earth. Pollution from cross country shipping and carbon dioxide produced by farm animals like cows themselves takes its toll on the environment.

By reducing animal consumption, you make not only a healthy choice for the earth but a healthy choice for yourself. Meat in itself contains many healthful benefits, but also contains saturated fats and cholesterol that may impair heart health. Generally the American diet lacks unprocessed vegetables, replacing some of the meat in your diet with green things fills your plate with vital nutrients and fibers.

Clean Up Your Banking Instead of merely recycling paper statements, request that banks and credit card companies make your accounts paperless. Do all of your banking online. If a card company continues to send you offers through the mail, contact their customer service department to lodge a complaint. While you won't be released from the mailing list, lodging enough complaints will let the company know that their customers favor eco-friendly practices and they will adapt that methods accordingly.

If you compare credit cards when looking for a new credit card company, consider signing up for a card that participates in an offsets program. The Brighter Planet Visa credit card through Bank of America offers offset purchase as an incentive versus traditional airline miles or cash back rewards. The Sierra Club Visa donates a percentage of purchases to the conservation efforts of the club.

Making smart choices about your finances and the way you receive financial reports helps declutter your home from needless paper waste.

Use Natural Cleansers The use of everyday household cleaners exposes groundwaters to toxic chemicals. Instead eliminate all noxious chemicals from your home and opt to use less harsh natural solutions for cleaning like white vinegar, baking soda, and salt to clean your home.

A combination of vinegar and baking soda makes and excellent grout cleaner that protects your home and lungs from harsh chemicals.

Consider also using the same combination to clean your body and hair. A solution of baking soda and vinegar cleans hair without stripping the scalp like other shampoos. This stripping process often causes the scalp to overcompensate and produce more natural oils. The baking soda/vinegar solution cleans hair while maintaining the integrity of the scalp.

Living an eco-friendly lifestyle means evaluating your day to day and taking actionable change to reduce your imprint on the environment. Eliminating chemicals, excess paper waste and reducing meat consumption all help lighten your tread. Continuously seek new ways to improve your at home behaviors. Making eco-friendly choices not only helps keep the earth healthy, those choices also keep you and your family healthy.

grow your greens, even in the shade!

How would you like to have yummy vegetables growing in every area in your yard, even those that don't seem to get a fair amount of sunshine?  It’s definitely possible, if you grow the right selection of plants. Though shade has always been thought of as the antithesis of gardening for food, I have learned in the past five years of growing in a shady spot (one with only two to three hours of direct sun per day) is that it is possible

The best crops to grow in the shady places of your garden/yard include the following:

You probably noticed that this list consists mostly of leafy greens and root vegetables (plus one plant that is often considered a weed, although a very pretty and nutritious weed!)  Many herbs may also be added to this list, as well as various types of beans such as green beans and lima beans, although they are not quite as successful as the greens and root veggies. Root vegetables do not require nearly as much sun as everyone usually expects, although growing in the share may delay the maturation of your harvest as compared to those grown in more direct sunlight.

radishes are truly the cutest vegetable.

Although this list does not include the vegetables that most people consider as essential to the garden– such as tomatoes, cucumbers and corn– the foods here will feed you and your household quite well. And if you do want to grow some tomato plants, these can be grown in large pots in the sunny areas that get at least six to eight hours of full sun.

Not only does shade gardening produce good good, it makes your gardening easily because weeding is nearly non-existent in comparison to areas which have access to abundant sun. The soil stays more moist with the broad leaves of the cabbage to hold in moisture. One last benefit I’ll add for food shade gardening is this thought – climate change is creating more drought conditions and given the intensity of the heat, plants are not easily able to grow in more desert-like conditions. With proper soil conditioning, shade gardens, with greater water holding capacity and less intense heat , may give cause to change how we eat seasonally.

And some additional information: don't feel that all the planting need happen at once. If you plan your plots for a spring, summer and autumn harvest you will find that you will have different planting times throughout the seasons.

To create the best schedule, simply count backward from the estimated harvest date to determine when to plant. Another benefit to staggering you’re your planting is that you will have an overall more productive garden. Since plants have differing growing habits (celery versus a cabbage for example) you will be able to fit more food into a smaller space by inter-planting.

Soil/garden image from Shutterstock/ Zocchi Roberto; cabbage image from Shutterstock/ Elenarts; radish image Shutterstock/ Larisa Lofitskaya

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I am not going to tell you who sent me this envelope, but I will tell you that it's an environmental group  dedicating to protecting forests.

I shared this on my personal Facebook, and it started a pretty interesting conversation! Obviously, sending out stacks of paper to tell us to save trees is pretty ironic, but below the surface, there is this question, which one of my friends put incredibly eloquently:

I'd like to point out that around 20% of all American households are not wired for the Internet. I'd also like to point out that it is entirely debatable as to whether or not the paper produced for this mailing is better or worse for the environment as compared to the electricity/heavy mining/chemicals needed to support the infrastructure of an all digital campaign. It's not entirely clear to me which is better, on balance.

What a great point! Just as recycled paper isn't always the best environmental choice, email blasts might seem greener but come with their own carbon footprint. It's hard to weigh the two and say which is worse.

My instinct is that printing thousands of packets and envelopes and sending them all over the country in mail trucks has a bigger impact than the data center lode from sending thousands of emails. My friend Jo Borras wrote a great piece a couple of years ago on direct mail (and the U.S. Postal Service in general) over at Gas2 that's worth a read. And on the other side, the energy it takes to send an email (or do anything online) is nothing to sneeze at, especially when you're talking thousands of communications. There's a helpful piece at Earth and Industry that looks at data centers and their impact.

And while this doesn't really contribute to the debate, my friend Joe wins quote of the day: "Under no circumstances should you burn that envelope to stay warm."

What do you guys think about direct mailings like this from environmental groups? Do they go against these groups's missions, or are they a necessary fundraising and awareness-raising evil?

Kids love fruit roll ups, but the conventional sort are full of artificial food coloring and GMO ingredients. You can find natural fruit roll ups made from dried fruit, but they're pretty pricey and come wrapped in single-use plastic. Next time your kiddo begs you for a fruit roll up in his lunchbox, grab your blender, a few ingredients, and whip up a batch at home instead! Check out the video recipe from Fifteen Spatulas:

What I love about this project is that you don't need special equipment to make it. Instead of a food dehydrator, she uses her oven to dry out the fruit roll up. It's also flexible. Strawberry looks delicious, but you could also experiment with other fruits, like fresh peeled peaches, raspberries, or cherries!

I think pretty much any berries or stone fruits would work well with her recipe, but crunchier fruit like apples or pears might need a little tweaking.

Have you made fruit leather at home? I'd love to hear your favorite DIY fruit roll up recipes!

Image Credit: Strawberries photo via Shutterstock

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Our latest roundup of annotated eco news.

Cape Cod beach photo via Shutterstock.com

From Natural Products Insider:

The study, led by McGill University in Montreal, found that calcium supplementation up to 1,000mg daily was linked to lower risk of death in women.

The study’s lead author David Goltzman, M.D. said in a statement:

“Higher amounts of calcium were potentially linked to longer lifespans in women, regardless of the source of the calcium … the same benefits were seen when the calcium came from dairy foods, non-dairy foods or supplements."

Although calcium is an essential nutrient for bone health, past studies have linked calcium supplements to heart disease risk. However, calcium is essential to the human body and offers countless benefits from bone health to cancer.

As a side note, the full purpose of the study was to determine the association between calcium and vitamin D consumption; although the findings for vitamin C were favorable, they found no evidence of "benefit or harm associated with vitamin D intake."

Calcium supplement photo: Shutterstock

full disclosure: a sample of the following product was provided to us for free, for the purposes of a Tried and True Green Product Review.

Blondes do indeed make better t-shirts! Award-winning Norwegian designer/artist Lise Ellingsen is the creative genius behind the Blondes Make Better T-shirts line – a snazzy line of eco-friendly t-shirts that embody humor, style and a healthy respect for the environment in both their messaging and the use of eco-botanical fabrics.

Blondes Make Better T-shirts are really pieces of wearable art – destined to become collector’s items or take up an honored position in your style hall of fame. The shirts not only look and feel great but they're sustainably made — using only 100% sustainable, sweatshop-free and ethically responsible fabrics. One fabric, Promodal, is comprised of 40% beech tree and 60% eucalyptus tree. Another fabric is made of 50% recycled plastic bottles mixed with organic cotton.

The graphics are silk-screened by hand in California with water-based ink – some of them implore us to help endangered animals (both blonde and not blonde) while others pack more humorous messages relating to "blondeness". The tees are made of the highest quality materials and come with special care and wear labels so even a blonde can safely wash and dry them.

I wore my super-comfy "animals" t (above) and then gave it a wash – strictly cold water – and air dried it. The shirt retained its full vibrant color and didn't shrink one iota.

The shirts come in 3 lines: Oopps Tees, Blonde Moment Tees and Save the World Tees. See, and buy, more great eco-friendly t-shirts @ the blondes make better shirts website

What is Deep Energy Retrofit?

A deep energy retrofit involves getting a professional energy audit of your home and completing the suggested changes to achieve maximum energy savings. A retrofit uses integrative designs that take a whole-building approach – it requires more than merely making simple, fast changes, like upgrading an HVAC system or using energy-saving light bulbs. The following steps are included in a deep energy retrofit.

1. Home performance audit. When a professional conducts a home energy audit, he or she tests all areas of the dwelling to see how air-tight it is and how well the systems work together. The tests conducted include:

2. Building envelope optimization. The second step of a deep energy retrofit is optimizing the building envelope so there are no unnecessary air leaks. To properly seal a home, you must align the pressure and thermal boundaries. The pressure boundary is the surface that separates the inside of the home from the outside. The thermal boundary is the insulation between living spaces and non-living spaces of a home. Other ways to seal a home include installing proper insulation, weather stripping and energy efficient windows.

3. HVAC performance test. By measuring your HVAC’s performance, you’ll learn if there are any leaks or other inefficiencies in the system.

4. Renewable energy sources. An energy auditor can review the different forms of renewable power for which your home may qualify. Such forms of energy can include solar, wind, hydro and geothermal power.

How a Deep Energy Retrofit Improves Home Performance

 Image from EcoFriend.com