When Katie Lee Joel was growing up in the small town of Milton, West Virginia, every evening centered around dinner – and most of the meal’s ingredients never originated very far from the table.

Before “eating local” was the trend du jour, it was a part of life for Joel’s family. While her mother went to work, Joel and her grandmother spent most of their days in the kitchen, preparing vegetables from her grandfather’s garden and meat from pigs or cows raised on nearby family farms. “Everyone shared food and it was really a community sense of eating,” says Joel, 26. “People are finding now that it’s the best way to eat – better for your own body and the environment.”

Now Joel, who is married to singer Billy Joel and known for her own right for hosting the first season of Bravo’s Top Chef and as a judge on the Food Network’s Iron Chef America, has written her first cookbook, The Comfort Table. The book mixes southern favorites from her childhood like fried green tomatoes, chicken and dumplings, and pulled pork bar-b-que with contemporary dishes like roasted carrot and ginger soup and Dijon and pistachio-crusted lamb. 

Continue reading Billy Joel’s wife talks about conscious consumption

Posted on May 8, 2008 at 7:46 AM
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One weekend when I was working at a local furniture store a co-worker and I were creating a new wall display behind the front counter. It was a quaint little country scene with a picture of a bird on a rustic barn door and a mirror in the shape of a chair but the display really needed something more. We searched the whole store trying to find a final addition for the wall but couldn't settle on anything that looked right.

Later that day I was standing out back during one of my breaks and happened to notice all the wood from discarded furniture shipping pallets piled up by the dumpster. I thought it was such a waste that all that wood was getting thrown away. Then I happened to notice that at each end of the wood were two round holes.

Continue reading DIY: Rustic birdhouses made from scrap wood

Posted on May 7, 2008 at 9:06 AM
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Late last January, scientists in New Hampshire found something unusual on ice-covered Lake Winnipesaukee: seventeen frozen loons. Usually, changes in day length and temperature cue the threatened birds to leave in early January for their wintering grounds off the Atlantic coast; they return to the lake about four months later to breed. Biologists think unseasonably warm weather may have disrupted their migratory instincts, prompting them to linger on the lake. When conditions turned harsh mid-month, the birds were already molting new flying feathers, which usually happens after they migrate. Unable to fly away, they succumbed to the frigid conditions. “It was very unexpected,” says Nick Rodenhouse, an ecologist at Wellesley College. “If warmer winters become more frequent, [loons] could die more often.” Continue reading Lost in migration: the perils of traversing a warming planet

Posted on May 6, 2008 at 7:00 AM
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A quick primer, in case you've never held an American chestnut: they're hard as a stone but smoother and lighter. Deep lustrous brown, as if carved from mahogany and oiled, and wrapped in hairy sheaths. These drop thumpingly from towering trees with canopies broad enough to shade a picnic.

Bing Crosby sang famously of chestnuts roasting over an open fire, but as kids my friend Gavin and I never thought of eating them. Chestnuts fit perfectly in the palm. Every fall we gathered them in a sled and threw them at neighborhood bullies. The remainder went to squirrels preparing for a long Maine winter.

Continue reading Chinese DNA gives life to an American tree

Posted on May 5, 2008 at 7:17 AM
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If you’re looking for the next Inconvenient Truth, don’t look to New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival this year. Sure, the renowned festival is screening five shorts under the umbrella title Environmental Rupture. But with a name like that, you might expect to view films that focus on practices and processes that are harming ecosystems, like climate change, mountain top removal, or coral reefs dying.  Instead, you’ll see a photo essay on Hiroshima; a 94-second abstract the creator said was inspired by polar ice caps; a 24-minute look at abandoned homes and lurking alligators near Florida’s Kennedy Space Center; a fascinating, trippy visual experiment with water and “states of mind”; and a black-and-white documentary-esque film about a Holocaust survivor and the Dusseldorf train station where her terrible journey began.

Continue reading Is a Holocaust documentary environmental art?

Posted on May 2, 2008 at 8:35 AM
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