Great Potato Salad Recipe (Courtesy of Mark Bittman)

Normally I don't post recipes, but this one is simply superb. Please bear in mind that Mark Bittman used entirely approximate amounts, so adjust based on your tastes

Ingredients:

3 Yams/Sweet Potatoes, peeled

1/3 of a red onion, sliced into squares

3tbsp olive oil

Juice from 2 limes

1 Jalapeno Pepper

2 cloves of garlic

1 cup fresh cilantro, chopped

1/2 can black beans

1. Dice the potatoes into bite-sized cubes and roast on a baking sheet with onions for approximately 25 minutes at 375F

2. Combine oil, garlic, lime juice, and jalapeno into a food processor. Blend until fine

3. Remove potatoes and onions from oven, and allow to cool

4. Drain and rinse black beans until clean

5. Combine all ingredients in a bowl. Toss and serve.

It's just that easy, and truly blows regular potato salad out of the water. Check out out some of the pictures we took making it last night, and find the original vid here.

Citrus-y, sweet, springy, and just plain awesome. Who said eating vegetarian had to be boring?

From TED: Cary Fowler on Crop Biodiversity

I recall just over a year ago, Kristen and I were at a green living festival in Newmarket, Ontario, and passed by a number of activism booths.  Somewhere in between the Green Party of Canada and several climate change petitioners, there was a lone man asking for signatures to support crop biodiversity.  At the time, we didn't understand the problem, and wrote him off as extreme.  Perhaps we thought he should be focussing on bigger issues like climate change, organics, or renewable energy.

Fast forward a year.  I have experienced a little bit more, read a whole lot more, and grown in my appreciation for the breadth of environmental issues facing us.  I have tasted beautiful, meaty heirloom tomatoes and learned about the risks that come with loss of biodiversity.  So recently, when I saw Cary Fowler's lecture on crop biodiversity, I was able to appreciate why his work is so important.

What Fowler really delves into at the end of his lecture is that -not unlike many other environmental issues- we canot solve any of our major problems without dealing with biodiversity.  Climate change, the water crisis, species extinction, deforestation, renewable energy, and all other similar problems are not easily solved, are require a holistic solution.  That is, we cannot solve any of them properly without dealing with all of them.  Even a superficial evaluation yields that deforestation causes both species extinction and climate change (as does the mining of non-renewables).  Our current farming practices lead to loss of biodiversity, soil errosion, deforestation, greenhouse gases, and the cycle goes on.

The good news is that Fowler, along with his colleagues and the government of Norway, are doing something about it.  I won't ruin the ending for you, so check out the video for yourself.  You can also do something yourself, watching out for Heirloom vegetables, and explore all the varieties that you can find in stores and on farms.  What I suspect you will find is that many of the rarer varieties are not so because they are worse than the grocery store variety.  In many cases, they are much, much, more flavourful and tastier (the best sandwich making tomatoes I have ever had were a big, red, meaty type of Heirloom)

Check it out!

My ideas as your ideas as you are me and we create together...

There is a sweet sort of irony in the fact that Darwin was not the pioneering mind of evolutionary theory, but rather its adopter, refiner, and perhaps perfecter.  Although he undoubtedly contributed a great deal to the theory (probably more than his predecessors) it is important to note that like Darwin's creatures of the Galapogos, great ideas are rarely born, but developed, often collaboratively.

The source of ideas is especially important today because in an increasingly technological world, they are often come and gone before we are able to slow down and realize what is happening.  In his lecture "The Rise of the Amateur Professional"

Charles Leadbetter talks about how cultural innovation is becoming increasingly collaborative, evolving through user modification and testing.  What is amazing is that in many fields, R&D labratories may not be able to keep up, as open-sourced culture will not only be designed by consumers for consumers, but also will be able to be tested for free, running hundreds, thousands, or even millions of trials simultaneously.

Although Leadbetter uses examples like the invention of the mountain bike to demonstrate his point, there are greater examples happening right now.  The existence of sites like YouTube (outside of simply posting existing material) say to established media "We don't need you!", offering a programming channel for everything from comedy to cooking shows to comentary on the politicians we love to hate.  All open source.  All amateur.  All the time.

Time Magazine's 2006 Person of the Year article (it was you, congratulations!!) says,

"America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy."

Learning from the music industry's major failure to embrace user control of media and culture, many companies have simply given up trying to stay ahead, and are simply turning to the users to tell them exactly what they want, when, and how much of it to give.  Countless artists have been signed because of large followings on Myspace (see: Fall Out Boy) or YouTube, or the Idol shows, the latter of which do it in real time.  It seems that those that have adapted to the new sources of culture have survived, and those that have dragged their feet have fallen behind.

Lastly, and on a slightly more serious note, in this new collaborative culture machine, it is extremely important that we take our responsibility seriously as users.  When we buy or use products or services, we give it our personal stamp of approval, and in avoiding them, we can demonstrate our disapproval.  We have a tremendous amount of power as individuals today to change our own world, and it starts with what we do, what we buy, what we wear, and what we eat.  I am not asking you to boycott anything, but simply to be aware, be informed, know your options, and if you desire change, always know that what you do makes a difference.

TED

I have recently taken quite an interest in watching a lecture series on youtube called the TED seminars (Technology, Entertainment, Design). They are a series of seminars from the greatest scientists, anthropologists, designers, politicians, etc on ways we can help change the world, often relating to their own expertise, but certainly not limited to it. These are unquestionably the best lectures I have ever seen and I highly recommend checking one or two out if you want to learn something without actually having to read anything. They are only about 2-30 minutes each usually so they are quite easy to digest. I have included one relating to health and environmentalism called "What's wrong with what we eat" by Mark Bittman (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YkNkscBEp0). Other speakers have included Al Gore, Jane Goodall, and others, and include subjects ranging from poverty to economic change to global warming to just human nature in general, so there's something for everyone.

Ps, as many of you know, I am a vegetarian, and if you want to know some of the reasons why, or you are thinking about it yourself, check out the Bittman video. In fact, check it out anyways because it's worth watching even from a health perspective. He isn't a vegetarian himself so I promise he won't try and guilt you into it. Preview: Nearly a fifth of greenhouse gases come from industrial livestock production. 10 BILLION animals are killed every year for human use in the United States alone. 70% of the agricultural land in the world (30% of the earth's land surface) is attributed directly or indirectly to producing the animals we eat. Check it out.