If you want to get on with living green, but are finding it too challenging to get there, this is a good guide. She makes it simple to get started with suggested cleaning, beauty, and every day products most of us use. There are even make-it-yourself products. Renee Loux is also a raw foods chef and embraces whole foods living.
The simple living, whole foods living, eco-friendly conversations that have really gained momentum over the past few years really take me back. When I was a kid, we had a huge garden. Every year we planted and grew potatoes, green beans, peas, watermelon, cantaloupe, carrots, sweet corn, pickles, tomato, lettuce, cabbage, and, much to my dismay, turnips and squash. (It wasn't until I moved to the south that I learned how tasty squash could be dressed up in brown sugar and pecans.) Some nights when mom was getting ready to start preparing dinner she'd say, "can you go to the garden and dig up some potatoes," or "can you let the peas out of the pod?" I loved to do it, too, it wasn't work to me, it was fun. Then, a couple of times during the season we had a weekend canning and freezing ritual. We packed and froze beans, peas and carrots. Mom canned jams of many flavors and we packed pickle after pickle into the mason jar full or fresh garden dill. Out in the garage, dad boiled huge roasting pots of tomatoes which were streamed into jars and served as juice with breakfast all winter long. The cabbage was turned to sauerkraut, and zuchini breads of various flavors were baked and frozen. It was like a summer foods festival. Today, it might be called simple living or whole foods living, but back then, for my family, it was just every day living.
Then my grandmother would show up with her homemade lye soap, and her all-cotton quilts. Every holiday season, grandma would show up and she and mom would bake homemade bread, coffee cake, and endless dozens of cookies. Me and my brothers would enjoy hot buttery slices of fresh-baked bread and help decorate the cookies.
These childhool backflashes inpsired by this book make me long for those days a little, but also inspire hope in the simplicity of making changes toward healthier, safer living isn't far out of reach.
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