Sara Snow's Fresh Living: The Essential Room-By-Room Guide to a Greener, Healthier Family and Home - Softcover

Snow, Sara

 
9780553385960: Sara Snow's Fresh Living: The Essential Room-By-Room Guide to a Greener, Healthier Family and Home
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0553385968 ISBN 13: 9780553385960
Verlag: BANTAM TRADE, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

In this easy-to-follow guide, the green-living expert and host of the popular TV shows Living Fresh and Get Fresh with Sara Snow offers busy families simple, affordable ways to create a healthy, environmentally friendly home—room by room.

Every day, families make countless consumer choices, from which diapers to use to which apples to buy, to whether their next car should be a hybrid. For new parents concerned about the future of their children—and of the planet they will leave them—being informed feels especially urgent. But in the midst of a booming natural and organics industry, the many options can make easing into living green confusing. Now Sara Snow offers practical solutions for every aspect of family life, from laundry to recycling to decorating the nursery. Discover ways to green…

• your kitchen with healthier foods and safer cooking and storage options
• your bathroom with recycled toilet and tissue paper and nontoxic cleaning supplies
• your bedroom—and your love life—with chic eco-friendly bedding and sexy personal products
• your yard with a rain barrel attached to your gutter downspout to reduce runoff, prevent erosion, and capture clean water for your flowers, vegetables, and lawn

And there’s much more to inspire and encourage you, from advice on introducing children to healthy eating, to products and foods for your animal companions, to chemical-free gardening—plus sidebars offering insider secrets from green-living pioneers. Here is an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to do something positive for the well-being of their family, while leaving a lighter footprint on the world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sara Snow is a lifelong advocate of organic, healthy living and travels the country as a green lifestyle expert. She is the popular host of two cable television shows, Living Fresh and Get Fresh with Sara Snow. In addition to her Discovery Network shows, Sara is advising the network on their newest cable network, PlanetGreen, a channel devoted entirely to green living, writes a column for treehugger.com, is host of a regular segment for CNN.com called Living Green with Sara Snow, and is on the board of The Organic Center. She lives with her husband Ryan and their dog Makana in Indianapolis.

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My Story


My unusual upbringing and family story are fundamental to who I have become. These days, what fuels my passion and activism are not only the changes I see happening in the world around me, but also the way I was raised and the environmental lessons my parents taught as I was growing up.

For this reason, any time I speak to an audience, whether through television or on stage, whether I'm talking about ways people can create healthier homes or how businesses can green their practices, I always start out with a primer on my upbringing. And the first line of my story is almost always “I grew up in a home that was different from most.” But I started wondering one day if I was exaggerating. Maybe most people's homes were a little like mine, and they lived off the land the way I did growing up. When I tell the story, I'm not trying to imply that my family's lifestyle was better than everyone else's, just that it probably was different, and, in truth, it was likely more sustainable. And though it was also rough and tough in many senses, we were doing our best to live in a low- impact way and in tune with nature, or to be “harmonious” with the world around, to use a family term.


In the pages that follow, you'll learn about all that, but you'll also discover that as I grew older I fell off the eco trail for a short while. I didn't intend to, but it didn't take long before I could feel the difference, and it was the process of getting back on track that proved ultimately to be my most valuable lesson. I learned a lot about myself, and about how to get back to a more natural state of living, about what works and what in particular is easy for people who are just starting out and moving toward greener, more natural living.

I also learned that there is no such thing as perfect.My parents weren't perfect, I'm certainly not, and I won't ever expect you to be. Choosing to live more sustainably isn't one- size- fits- all and it's not all- or- nothing. It's about a series of small steps and changes toward greater health and harmony. I was lucky;my parents started taking those steps before I even came into this world.

My Upbringing


I was born at home, in my parents' bed. There weren't many naturopathic Ob/Gyn's at the time, and home births were not very common, but my parents found someone they trusted-someone who would make house calls and home deliveries-so that our first breaths wouldn't be in the sterile environment of a hospital. My older brother took a long time to come into this world. Dr. Vander Yacht napped on the couch off and on for the final six of the twenty- six hours that my mom labored. About two years later I was a little quicker, but without any meds at all my mom felt every moment of my birth. At the time, we were living in a small house in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan, is a town made up of educated, liberal nature lovers. Not everyone there fits this snapshot, of course, but with over one- quarter of city residents employed by the university, definitely more so than average. The city is known for, among other things, an internationally recognized art fair and the “Hash Bash,” during which possession of marijuana used to be punished only by a five- dollar fine. (The fine has since increased considerably.)

And it was into this offbeat Ann Arbor community that I was born. At the time, in July of 1976, my parents were already deeply involved in the booming natural products and natural foods movement, a movement that would later help birth the “green movement” of today. My dad, Tim Redmond, was raised in Birmingham, Michigan, an affluent suburb of Detroit, as the younger of two sons of a successful businessman. His dad, my grandfather, had founded a company dealing in industrial rubber in the auto capital of the world, Detroit, prior to the Second World War. He and my grandmother and the two boys lived quite a comfortable life in the postwar years. My dad went to college to study business but came out with a degree in English literature and education. So after college, rather than taking over his father's business, which would have immediately provided a certain level of prominence and comfort, Tim announced to his much- chagrined father that he wanted to “do his own thing” and that his intentions were to save the world . . . through food.

My mom, Pattie, was the daughter of an accountant/economist and a nursery school music teacher. For most of his career, my maternal grandfather worked for U.S. Steel in New York City. My mother grew up with two sisters in a home in Princeton, New Jersey, where dinner table conversations centered on serious matters like religion and politics, punctuated by a lot of girlish giggling. Pattie followed her older sister Judy to Ann Arbor in 1970 when Judy needed a nanny and my mom needed a break from college. It didn't take long for Pattie's and Tim's worlds to intersect on the city sidewalks of Ann Arbor.

Around this same time, a Japanese man named Michio Kushi was be - ginning to teach about a lifestyle and food practice called macrobiotics. Macrobiotics is a Greek word meaning “great life” or “whole life” and was first used by the father of medicine himself, Hippocrates. Kushi's mentor George Ohsawa, the founder of macrobiotics, had in the early 1900s used a regimen of holistic living and pure, natural foods to cure himself of lung tuberculosis. He became resolute in his belief in the power of whole and living foods, and went on to teach others about this practice that he called macrobiotics. Ohsawa believed there was a second layer to “food is health,” and that is that “health is the key to peace.” He thought that if we could all return to a traditional diet of whole and natural foods, humanity would become more peaceful by reclaiming our physical and mental balance. Michio Kushi and a few of George Ohsawa's other early followers took his teachings to Germany, France, Brazil, and the United States.

And this is where I (or my parents) come back into the picture. Around the time my dad was making the announcement about his intentions to save the world through food, he was spending time in Boston training under Michio Kushi, learning the principles of macrobiotics and natural foods. Tim came back to Ann Arbor in 1970 and, in the entrepreneurial fashion of his father, cofounded a macrobiotic natural food business called Eden Foods. (One of his buddies and Eden cofounder at the time, coincidentally, was Mark Retzloff, who later went on to cofound Horizon Organic Dairy, the company that first brought organic milk to America's food stores.) Eden, now an internationally respected name in the organic food business, started off as a simple natural- foods buying club, then grew into a retail store, and grew again into a distributor and processor. In step with increasing demand from the burgeoning number of young back- to- the- landers and readers of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog and Robert Rodale's Organic Gardening magazine, my dad forged relationships with farmers and food producers who were growing and processing whole and natural foods that were synonymous with the macrobiotic diet. In the early 1970s, well before organic farming on a commercial scale really existed, my dad and his group had a vision for a company based on sustainable agriculture and the distribution of natural foods: whole grains, stone- ground flours, unfiltered oils, beans, seeds, nuts, sea vegetables, and other unprocessed, unrefined foods. “Real” foods, they called them. Their vision was to change the way America eats-to get Americans off Twinkies and Coca- Cola, and to create a better world through healthier living. At first...

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Verlag
BANTAM TRADE
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553385968
ISBN 13 
9780553385960
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
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