Recipes From the Garden
From the garden come ingredients and inspiration for meals. It is hard to separate eating and gardens, so including a few recipes seemed a natural when thinking about connections and relationships in the gardens.
Growing your own vegetables and friuts, prepared minutes from picking, provides a healthy alternative to store-bought produce. Commercial produce is sometimes placed in storage warehouses, transported in trucks, trains and/or airplanes over long distances, then handled and picked over by numerous other people before chosen for your own household.
Homegrown can be pesticide free
Most fresh vegetables from the store were sprayed with pesticides to prevent any pest damage and appear perfect-looking. Consumers do not accept any blemishes on produce even if there is nothing wrong with it. Mass produced produce with damage from disease or insects is likely to rot easily, so for economic reasons, pesticides are used. For health reasons, human, as well as the health of the entire ecosystem, pesticides can be dangerous. Growing it yourself, you know that there are no dangerous pesticides coating your food unless you choose to do this to yourself and family.
Vegetarian Recipes
Most of the recipes included here are vegetarian. A healthy diet includes vegetables and vegetables of every color, whole gain breads and cereals, and beans and legumes for protien. Legumes are dried beans and pulses and combined with whole grains make a complete protein superior to meat based protien because it does not raise choloesterol levels.
A vegetarian lifestyle is very healthy as long as fats and oils are kept low and sugary foods. Food certainly tastes much more clean and fresh than greasy heavy meat based meals. The new USDA guidelines reccomend more servings of vegetables than in the past for a healthy diet, so even the government is encouraging more vegetables. The American Cancer Association diet reccomends limiting red meat because of the links of red meat and cancers.
A vegetarian diet has a lower impact upon the Earth than a diet where each meal is based primarialy around meat. This is because a non meat diet is lower on the life chain.
"One pound of steak from cattle raised in a feedlot costs five pounds of grain, 2,500 gallons of water, the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline and about 35 pounds of eroded topsoil." (Professor Peter Singer, Princeton University, auther of "Animal Liberation and Vegetarianism", Ethics of food, p.33)
