Recipe: Couscous Crisis

Home from school or work with zero time to cook? Feel a food crisis coming on? Save the snacking for someone else. This traditional North African dish is made of fine grains of semolina and cooks in less than 5 minutes. Add your favorite sweet vegetables and dried fruits and you've got yourself a filling, yet low-calorie mini-meal.

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Feature: Redoing School Lunches

September is here and parents around the nation despair at their child's school lunch choices. You can either send the kids off with lunch money, or hastily prepare a brown-bag goodie. One alternative leaves child nutrition in question, and the other has parents investing in large amounts of plastic baggies, single serving plastic containers and disposal Tupperware that never makes it home. That's nearly 67 pounds of garbage a year per child generated from lunchtime trash! Here's what two California mothers did to solve both problems.

The Laptop Lunchbox
From Body and Soul Magazine, September 2004

When Amy Hemmert and Tammy Pelstring of Santa Cruz got together to do lunch, they had more in mind than a salad. In fact, they didn't want to just "do" lunch at all - they wanted to redo it. In an effort to cut back on waste in their community, the two women joined a group of other eco-conscious mothers in rethinking how and what their families eat. Turns out, one of the biggest culprits was the disposable lunch.

For the busy mothers, rethinking lunch meant not only finding alternatives to throwaway lunch packaging but changing the whole approach to the midday meal. In our eat-and-run culture, they began to advocate a holistic shift in shopping for, preparing and transporting food. They started by limiting or even ruling out disposables, buying food in organic bulk instead of tiny packages, and using reusable containers. For healthier homemade lunches, they packed more fresh fruit, less candy and fewer processed snacks.

Hemmert and Pelstring didn't stop there. They took their message to the local school system and implemented the Waste-Free Lunch Program in which parents, students, and faculty work together to reduce waste by recycling, composting and making lunch programs more eco-friendly. Then they went national, launching wastefreelunches.org, a Web site featuring resources, success stories, and tools for implementing waste-free programs.

Based on the Japanese bento box, they created a system of colorful plastic containers that fit together inside a lunch box like puzzle pieces. The hot selling kit called the Laptop Lunch (laptoplunches.com) comes with stainless-steel utensils, a drink bottle and a user's guide containing nutritional information, recipes and tips on going waste free and healthy; it all zips into an insulated mini-laptop case that's appropriate for kids or adults to carry.

"We wanted to give people an alternative to prepackaged foods. With the lunch kit, you open the box, and you see a delicious meal, instead of lids, foil and plastic," says Hemmert. What makes the system work, she says, is that kids - and adults - take ownership of it. "When it's theirs," she says, "they take care of it - unlike piles of Tupperware that never make it home again."

Excerpted from Body & Soul Magazine's September 2004 article, "Lunch Boxes, With an eye on the environment, two mothers reinvent the midday meal." By Terri Trespicio www.bodyandsoulmag.com

Success Story: Creating Community Health - Santha Cooke

As a child I grew up in deprivation and abuse. As a result, both my body and heart were often in pain, when I could feel them at all. As an adult, I worked and studied, becoming a teacher and then a massage therapist. I loved my work, but was not a particularly successful business-woman, since I knew very little about being in business for myself.

Soon I was a mother and had even less time to follow my dreams or connect with others. Living in rural isolation with two young children, I became exhausted! Cooking was a chore and everything was hard work, especially my relationships. I desired more community and connection with like-minded folks but didn't know what to do about it.

Integrative Nutrition changed all that. The School taught me how to nourish myself, body and soul. It showed me how I could pour all of my experience from a lifetime of study and teaching into a holistic health counseling program that pays me well to help others create lives they can love and enjoy. Most importantly, it has given me a way to build and transform community - especially here in my home town where I have lived all my life.

Since I began health counseling just 4 years ago, I've tried so many new things and created so many fantastic health-oriented events for myself and my community! I've been on TV, published an e-mail newsletter and built my own website. I've given corporate lectures. I've presented workshops focusing on ancient Goddesses and on eating disorders. I've hosted a series of musical concert events designed to nourish the soul, and become a better musician myself. I've been invited to speak at a training school for sensuality and at a Catholic retreat, both in the same week! I've joined the Boards of Directors of two local organizations concerned with sustainable agriculture, food justice, and hunger action.

I've traveled throughout the country, meeting people, learning and talking about transformation of our relationship with food, soil and the Earth Mother Gaia. And all the while, I've maintained an on-going private practice and a balanced family life, bringing help and healing to individuals in my local community. The school gave me the freedom and the skills to be and to go for whatever I wanted. Who knows what will be next?

Santha Cooke
Integrative Nutrition Graduate, Class of 2000

Quotable Quote

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."

-Virginia Woolf