Growing Food at the Office

While walking around the Union Square Greenmarket a few months ago in search of a new plant to add to the papyrus, ivy, and sedum already in my window, I came across red leaf lettuce sprouts being sold for just a few bucks. I was really hungry at the time, which made the idea of growing something I could eat even better. Now, just as I blog about taking part in the No Impact Experiment, it’s time to harvest my first crop! If you’re at all curious to try this yourself, look around online to see how easy it can be.

Eating and Drinking Green at NRDC

As I began to describe in my post on Monday, there are lots of ways NRDC makes it easy for us to lower our environmental impact while at work. NRDC stocks the kitchen with basics like hot chocolate, tea, fair-trade organic coffee—BioGems blend, a collaboration with Bean Trees that also supports our efforts to defend special wild places throughout the Americas—soy milk, and milk and half-and-half from Meadow Brook Farms in upstate New York. Each kitchen also includes a water cooler that delivers filtered NYC tap water.

When it comes to catering, NRDC’s food policy calls for choosing items with the smallest environmental impact. Vegetarian options must always be provided. Poultry and sustainably caught fish are the preferred animal options. Red meat is prohibited for good environmental reasons. I’m obviously painting the policy with very broad strokes. The challenge of measuring the impact of food choices can be quite difficult. Would a chicken that may have come from a huge commercial operation a thousand miles away really be a better than locally and sustainable raised lamb? Maybe not, but for the purpose of ease of implementation we follow these broad guidelines and then attempt to choose the most sustainable option we can find.

Foraging in the Neighborhood

During my no impact week I brought lunch to work every day to avoid the packaging that comes with take-out and minimize the amount of money I spent on food. Had I been looking for a sustainable lunch option I could’ve walked over to the Union Square Greenmarket and perused the offerings from the roughly 140 producers.

While walking around the market to take photos for this post I stumbled across Robin Puskas providing a cooking demonstration and recipes using Greenmarket ingredients. Check out her suggestion for putting together a better-than-Subway sandwich.

Access and Affordability

I am fortunate that NRDC chose a location for its New York office that is just a few blocks from the largest Greenmarket in the city—open on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays year-round. While local farmer’s markets are cropping up more regularly around New York City and around the country, with many now accepting food stamps/EBT cards, there are still far too many people who have little or no access to healthy and affordable food.

In some neighborhoods food co-ops are fantastic solutions for both access and affordability. As non-profit organizations supported by their members, food co-ops can provide very high-quality food at prices often far below for-profit chains. Becoming a regular customer at my first co-op—Glut Food Co-op in Maryland just over the line from DC—was a revelation in how pleasant and painless (financially) food shopping could be. At Glut the entire experience was about the quality of the food and the health of the customers.

More to Chew On

Back here in New York progress is being made to extend the reach of local farmer’s baskets into more corners of the city. And when traveling on the New York State Thruway you will now find locally grown food options at the rest stops. Granted that change is a very small and overdue, especially given that New York is the nation’s second-leading grower of apples. We also need big changes in the way big agriculture operates in this country (more in a future post). Nonetheless, these kinds of changes are helping to throw off the blinders about what is possible and where when it comes to food.