DailyDirt: Sustainable Eating -- Yummy Or Gross?

Plenty of people like a big, rare steak every once in a while. It's probably not the healthiest meal, but everything in moderation, right? How about insect protein for "meatless Mondays" or seaweed salads before dinner? Everything in moderation, right? Here are just a few interesting ways to expand your palate and maybe eat in a more sustainable fashion -- if you can stomach it.

• Farm to table isn't really that sustainable for the San Francisco restaurant, The Perennial, which boasts a farm to table back to farm and repeat cycle. Leftovers from the restaurant go back to the farm, but it's not clear how well this really works out if they still have cow meat on the menu. [url]
• Are you ready to eat home-grown insects from your very own "desktop hive" that consumes your vegetable scraps to feed hundreds of writhing mealworms? You can pre-order a hive from a Kickstarter campaign that reached its goal in January. It's just protein. Do you know where the protein you've been eating comes from? [url]
• Eating corn fungus doesn't sound so appetizing when the discolored, tumor-like growth is usually called smut or "devil's corn" by farmers. However, Ustilago maydis (the fungus) is also a delicacy that can be eaten, so maybe people just need to re-think what they think is edible. [url]
• Seaweed farming could be a nice, sustainable way to grow nutritious food -- if only more people ate (and enjoyed) seaweed. Ocean farming and aquaculture could be an alternative to land-based farming, but the practice needs to be researched and studied to make sure it's as environmentally friendly as it can be. It's no use to get a lot of people acquiring a taste for kelp if we destroy the ocean ecosystem to grow it. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story