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Lately I’m reading a book called “Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating,” by Mark Bittman (a.k.a. NY Times’ “The Minimalist“), and Earth Day seems like the perfect time to tell you about it.

Bittman’s thesis is simple but sobering: What you choose to put on your plate has a direct impact on the environment, especially in terms of global warming. Especially if that something is beef, raised on a factory farm.

To produce one calorie of corn takes 2.2 calories of fossil fuel…but if you process that corn, and feed it to a steer, and take into account all the other needs that steer has through its lifetime—land use, chemical fertilizers (largely petroleum-based), pesticides, machinery, transport, drugs, water and so on—you’re responsible for 40 calories of energy to get that same calories of protein.

Still don’t get it? He puts it more bluntly:

Eating a typical family-of-four steak dinner is the rough equivalent, energy-wise, of driving around in an SUV for three hours while leaving all the lights on at home.

Calm down, carnivores! Bittman’s not saying you have to become a vegetarian, and neither am I. He’s simply pointing out that Americans eat far more meat than we need from a nutritional standpoint. Both our bodies and our planet would be a lot healthier if we would cut back even occasionally on our beloved burgers and buckets of fried chicken. Or, as Michael Pollan famously wrote: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Bittman’s personal approach to eating more consciously, he says, is to consume about one-third as much meat, dairy and fish as he used to. Refined carbohydrates, fast food, or junk food are only occasional indulgences, with the exception of pasta, which he still eats regularly. It’s been a big change, but a “nearly painless” one, he says, and has brought down his weight, blood sugar and cholesterol. And interestingly, his appetite and food preferences have adjusted to match his new habits. While some diets grow tiresome in the long run, this one feels more natural with time.

As someone who made a similar shift about 10 years ago, I heartily agree. It’s been so long since I considered McDonalds or Burger King as vendors of actual food that it doesn’t even occur to me to stop there when I’m hungry; they might as well be selling office supplies. I don’t have to force myself to eat vegetables—I crave them. (On a trip to Germany, after days of dining mostly at tourist cafes whose idea of a “salad” was a few scraps of cabbage slathered in mayonnaise, I literally dreamed about broccoli at night!)

On the other hand, I’m far from perfect. I still eat some processed foods, and several of the soy-based products in my fridge and freezer come from industrial-scale farms too many miles away. I don’t have a garden (although this year I’ve invested in a CSA half-share which will supply me with a weekly bounty of locally grown, organic fruits and vegetables). And I’m not giving up coffee, wine, cheese, or chocolate, even though I don’t technically “need” any of them in my diet. But I will be more thoughtful about the sources I support with my food dollars, both at the grocery store and in restaurants.

That’s Bittman’s point: Eat sanely. Eat consciously. And enjoy.

The best way to eat Bugles. Courtesy Flickr user V'ron

There were some bags of Bugles lying on the table in the break room the other day, and I was sorely tempted to take one. Not because I actually wanted to eat them—too salty—but because I had a flashback to childhood, when I used to stick one of those strange funnel-shaped snacks on each finger, creating what looked like corny claws. I always figured I was the only person weird enough to do that, but two coworkers passing by had the same reaction: Bugles! Finger snacks! I remember when…

Pringles can make you look like a duck. Courtesy Flickr user Jeffisageek

That got me thinking about other foods I liked to play with as a kid. Duck lips made out of Pringles; what about Twizzler straws (just bite off both ends and stick it in your soda)? Skittles or M&M flowers? Or that gross-but-giggly camp game called “Chubby Bunny” which involves seeing which kid can stuff the most marshmallows in their mouth while still articulating those two words?

Not that it has to be junk food to inspire play, of course. You can turn broccoli into a poodle, celery and raisins into “ants on a log,” or strawberries into mice.

Today I discovered something that seems to have been invented just for me, combining my love of word play, cheesy snacks, and general goofiness: Scrabble Cheez-Its. (As the Endless Simmer blogger so aptly puts it, “Have I died and gone to heaven?”)

What foods did you play with, or perhaps still do?

Greensulate is an environmentally friendly insulation made from mushrooms and agricultural byproducts. Photograph courtesy of Ecovative Design.

If having fungus inside your home’s walls sounds like a bad thing, the judges of the 2008 PICNIC Green Challenge would disagree. In October, Eben Bayer, a 23-year-old from Troy, New York, won 500,000 euros in the second annual Dutch-sponsored competition for the best solution to reducing greenhouse gases, with his plan for a renewable, biodegradable insulation material made partially from the root structure of mushrooms, or mycelium.

Bayer, who grew up on a Vermont farm and used to hunt mushrooms with his father, co-founded Ecovative Design with Gavin McIntyre in 2007, shortly after they graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The pair hit upon their idea during a class called Inventors Studio. According to their Web site, they “were fascinated by mushrooms growing on wood chips, and observing how the fungal mycelium strongly bonded the wood chips together. This inspired them to think of new ways of using mycelium as a resin.”

The compound they developed, called Greensulate, uses mycelium to bind natural insulating materials such as rice hulls or cotton husks—whatever agricultural byproducts are available in the area where the material will be made. The end result is all-natural and non-toxic (assuming they use non-poisonous mushroom species, that is), and because the mycelium is simply grown indoors in a dark place and the composite can be made anywhere using local materials, it requires far less energy to create than most insulation material. It will eventually biodegrade, but should last the lifetime of the home, they claim.

They say the insulation has tested well for R-value and fire retardancy, and will be cost-competitive with traditional foams.

In January, Ecovative Design was awarded an Environmental Protection Agency grant to develop and test the product further. They are also looking at other uses for the composite, including as packing material and anywhere else polystyrene is presently used. They recently partnered with Patagonia to develop a green surfboard core.*

You can watch Bayer’s winning PICNIC Challenge presentation here.

Have your own green innovation? The 2009 PICNIC Green Challenge deadline is July 31.

*Eben Bayer pointed out that, although Ecovative Design had planned to use Greensulate for surfboard cores, its present formulation wasn’t the right texture for that application. They continue to develop new products, including Acorn, an organic packaging composite.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Howard-Yana Shapiro, the global director of plant sciences and external research for Mars, Incorporated, the world’s largest chocolate company (and largest pet food company, but try not to mix the two).

Howard-Yana Shapiro of Mars, Inc. spoke about chocolate history at Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in March

Shapiro co-edited a new book called “Chocolate: History, Culture and Heritage,” the result of a decade of Mars-funded chocolate history research based at the University of California, Davis. At nearly 1,000 pages and $100 a copy, I’m guessing this tome isn’t going to be a bestseller—it sat untouched on my desk for close to a month, intimidating me with its bulk—but it is an excellent reference work.

Curious about chocolate’s role in 18th-century British crimes? Chocolate in Cuban literature and games? The silver chocolate pots of colonial Boston? There’s a chapter about each of those things, and 53 more.

I flipped open to the chapter on chocolate and religion, and learned that Christ once hid from his enemies beneath a cacao tree, causing it to blossom and bear blessed fruit (according to the Quiche Mayans of northern Guatemala). Another random flip revealed a list of adulterants that have been added to chocolate through the years, including, perhaps, dinosaur bones! (“During the pre-Columbia era, ‘bones of giants’ (possibly vertebrate fossils) sometimes were ground and mixed with chocolate.”)

Then there’s the appendix, with an incredibly thorough “chocolate timeline” that could be a small book on its own. And as if all this wasn’t enough, there’s a second volume in the works for next year!

“Mars got curious,” Shapiro explained. “We wanted to understand the development and evolution of chocolate-based technology, of chocolate’s culinary, cultural, economic, dietary, medical, military, and social uses…the second volume will be about biology, chemistry, and the biomedical uses of chocolate.”

In other words, it seems, the world’s largest chocolate company wants to amass the world’s largest collection of chocolate research. The company is also involved in a project to sequence the cacao genome for public use, something Shapiro said should be complete within the next two years.

It makes me wonder: What’s in it for them? I mean, I’m all for the increase and diffusion of knowledge, of course. But how will Mars profit from knowing more about the history of chocolate, or unraveling its genetic code?

The answer’s pretty obvious, actually: This will hopefully lead to better cacao trees. Trees that could yield more high-quality cacao fruit while requiring less water, fertilizer and pesticides. And since the world’s appetite for chocolate products is ever-growing while the planet’s resources are ever-shrinking, that seems like a pretty good goal to me.

Mars isn’t the only company involved in chocolate research, although they certainly seem to be the largest. Hershey’s founded a nutrition research center in 2006, and Cadbury has invested in a Cocoa Partnership to promote fair trade and development (and yes, higher crop yields) in Ghana. The World Cocoa Foundation, which includes most of the major confectionery companies, also funds cocoa research in many countries.

I’m not quite sure who funded this, but it’s a bright idea: A Lindt chocolate plant and an electric utility in New Hampshire have been working together to make fuel from cacao-bean shells.

The many colors of bell peppers, courtesy of Flickr user Muffet

When I was in New York City recently, I noticed a listing for an intriguing event that combined art and cuisine (two of my favorite things) at Monkey Town, an art venue and restaurant in Williamsburg. For the Color Palate Project, ten international artists were invited to create a monochromatic work, each in a different color. These artworks were presented in turn, surrounding guests as they were served a course in the same color. For instance, the white course consisted of shrimp, pine nuts, miso, mirin and spiced daikon, and purple included Peruvian potatoes, cabbage and vinegar.

According to the Web site, the purpose of the event was “to open up all of the senses and to have an experience as a whole, where the awareness of vision, smell, taste and hearing are used and explored simultaneously with the full experience of the work and color presented.”

Although I wasn’t able to attend the event, it got me thinking about “eating the rainbow,” the idea that the surest path to a nutritious diet is to eat foods of many colors. Presumably, dieticians who recommend this are talking about naturally occurring colors, like the orange in carrots, as opposed to equally orange but vitamin-challenged Cheetos.

The reasoning behind the recommendation is that natural colors often reflect what nutrients a food contains. For instance, tomatoes and watermelons are red because they contain lycopene, which gets rid of free radicals that can damage genes. Other red and purple foods, including strawberries, plums and eggplant, are colored by anthocyanins, which act as antioxidants. Carrots, pumpkins and orange sweet potatoes contain beta-carotene, which is converted to vitamin A. Green foods, like spinach, broccoli, and green beans, are colored by chlorophyll, and often contain lutein and B-vitamins.

Despite their bad rep, even white foods (at least in vegetable form) have their place in the rainbow. Anthoxanthins, a type of flavonoid, give potatoes, bananas, cauliflower and garlic their white to yellow coloring. Food & Wine has a helpful guide to eating by color, along with yummy-sounding recipes.

Aside from its health benefits, color plays a significant role in food’s appeal. Color psychologist and branding consultant J. L. Morton (her online bio says she has helped clients like Tylenol choose colors for its pills) says that blue is an appetite suppressant. The reason is that blue food rarely appears in nature.

As Morton claims:

There are no leafy blue vegetables (blue lettuce?), no blue meats (blueburger, well-done please), and aside from blueberries and a few blue-purple potatoes from remote spots on the globe, blue just doesn’t exist in any significant quantity as a natural food color. Consequently, we don’t have an automatic appetite response to blue. Furthermore, our primal nature avoids food that are poisonous. A million years ago, when our earliest ancestors were foraging for food, blue, purple and black were ‘color warning signs’ of potentially lethal food.

Maybe so, but children appear to be immune to this response, to judge by all the blue-tongued kiddies drinking blue raspberry slushies every summer.

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