Our April Newsletter!

Welcome to the April Newsletter for Sustainable Table & The Meatrix!

• Feature Article – The Never Ending Farm Bill
• Featured Organization – WHY
• Webby People’s Voice Awards – Water: H20 = Life (Vote by May 1^st!)
• Special Guest Blogger – Kristy Apostilides
• Recipe of the Month – Tofu Pot Pie
• Hot Sustainability Tips – Ideal Bite
• What is Eat Healthy Monday?
• President Bush Says “Buy Local“
• Send to Friends
• Stay in Touch!

Feature Article – The Never Ending Farm Bill
May is almost here, and the Farm Bill was supposed to be finished, uh, last year. And, as of last week, the never ending deadlines continued to continue! Find out what’s happening in this month’s Feature Article.

Featured Organization – WHY
World Hunger Year addresses hunger and poverty in a way that hasn’t been possible yet for us here at Sustainable Table, so we’re delighted to have them as resource. Their website is a wealth of information to educate us about all issues surrounding hunger & poverty – internationally, economically, personally -and contains resources to help us get active in our community and beyond.

“WHY is convinced that solutions to hunger and poverty can be found at the grassroots level. WHY advances long-term solutions to hunger and poverty by supporting community-based organizations that empower individuals and build self-reliance, i.e., offering job training, education and after school programs; increasing access to housing and healthcare; providing microcredit and entrepreneurial opportunities; teaching people to grow their own food; and assisting small farmers. WHY connects these organizations to funders, media and legislators.

At WHY, we envision a world without hunger and poverty. If we can shift the prevailing viewpoint on why hunger and poverty exist, then we can influence the policymakers and put an end to this human tragedy.

WHY was founded by radio talk show host and present Executive Director Bill Ayres, and the late singer-songwriter Harry Chapin.”

Please read more about them on their website: www.worldhungeryear.org

Webby People’s Voice Award – Water: H2O=Life - Vote by MAY 1^st!
Water: H20=Life is not only the most exciting exhibition that’s been launched in the past couple years, the website has now been nominated for the Webby People’s Voice awards!

Produced by the American Museum of Natural History and strongly supported by the Tamarind Foundation, the exhibition and website teach us how precious fresh water is (which makes up only 3% of the earth’s surface), and how, if we’re not careful, we might not have any for future generations. The website details such things as where water comes from, the accessibility, cost, regeneration of, and so much more that we often take for granted.

The Webby Awards are “the” awards for websites – winning a Webby will give the Water: H2O=Life site exposure to a huge number of people – people who need to learn about problems we all face with our dwindling fresh water supplies and what we can do to preserve it.

Please go to their site today- Voting is only until May 1st! Just go to http://pv.webbyawards.com/account/pv_login and register. Once on the site, click on “Website”, “Society”, “Science” and then “Water: H2O=Life”. It’s quick, it’s easy – and it a way to help save the planet! Vote today! Winners will be announced May 6^th!

Special Guest Blogger – Kristy Apostolides
Kristy posted her first blog on The Daily Table (from Crete!) and is also helping us update information for our issues pages on the Sustainable Table website. We are looking forward to her fresh, international viewpoint – Welcome Kristy!

Kristy Apostolides received her B.S. in Plant Sciences from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and is currently a Masters candidate in Sustainable Agriculture at the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania, in Crete, Greece. She has nine years experience with organic agriculture in policy and practice and four years experience in training and curriculum development. Prior to pursuing an MSc degree, she was the Community Supported Agriculture Program Manager with the New York City nonprofit organization Just Food. She has organized and presented at over 20 conferences on sustainable agriculture related topics in the United States and Europe and currently serves on the International Committee for URGENCI, an organization which develops local solidarity-based commerce partnerships worldwide.

Recipe of the Month – Tofu Pot Pie
Comfort food, vegetarian style! Try this yummy recipe from our friend Ruth Blackburn, who was the
“Winner of Most Unusual/Unexpected Pie” in Ypsilanti, MI, during our Road Trip last year.

Check it out:
Your favorite pie crust – enough for bottom and top. (We have a lot of pie crust recipes on the Sustainable Table site (http://www.sustainabletable.org/kitchen/recipes/index.php?view=viewrecipe&rnum=213) if you don’t have a favorite crust yet.) Pre-bake bottom crust.

For filling: Combine ½ cup flour, ½ tsp garlic powder, 1 ½ tsp salt and 2T nutritional yeast (Redstar brand – not Brewers yeast) in a paper bag. Shake to mix. Add 4 cups cubed tofu and shake again.

Saute 1 cup diced onion with ½ cup diced carrots, ½ cup diced kohlrabi and 1 ½ cups cut green beans in a large skillet with oil. Set aside when cooked to desired consistency. Then put more oil in skillet and brown tofu cubes. Put veggies back in and add ½ tsp garlic powder and 2T soy sauce. Remove from heat. (Note: you can vary the vegetables depending on the season.)

For gravy: Combine ¼ cup flour and ½ cup nutritional yeast in a saucepan. Heat gently just until you can smell them. Add 1/3 cup oil and stir as you heat it. Whisk in 1 ½ cups water and cook, whisking, until gravy consistency. Stir in 2T soy sauce, ¾ tsp salt and 1/8 tsp pepper.

Place veggies and tofu in pre-baked pie shell – cover with gravy. Put top crust on and crimp edges.

Bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes. Enjoy!

Hot Tips from Ideal Bite – a Sassier Shade of Green
Ideal Bite offers bite-sized ideas for light-green living by sending ideas on easy ways to go green to hundreds of thousands of subscribers via a short, sassy email each weekday. The tips are fun, free, and peppered with information and actionable links. And it turns out that Ideal Bite thinks Sustainable Table is a good resource:

Eating in Season! & Why eat free-range, sustainable meat?

Sign up for Ideal Bite’s daily emails tips to green your life everyday!

What is Eat Healthy Monday?
Healthy Monday is a national campaign to get us all to think about our health on Mondays. The program focuses on all aspects of health, from food and eating better to quitting smoking and exercising. Healthy Monday is a project of Columbia University Mailman School, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School, and Syracuse University Newhouse School. Some of the tips and recipes we’ll be sharing with you are courtesy of the Eater’s Digest, a consumer newsletter focused on health issues.

President Bush Says “Buy Local”
Sustainable Table fully supports the creative solution suggested today by President Bush to buy food from local farmers as a means for communities to be more self sustaining. The nonprofit program adds that purchasing sustainably-raised local food is the best option for all Americans.

“Sustainable Table agrees with President Bush’s statement made today that large subsidies to multimillionaire farmers should be cut,” said Diane Hatz, Founder/Director of Sustainable Table. “We also think people should buy locally grown, sustainably produced food from small family farmers because it can save people money since it does not have to be shipped long distances, and saves consumers the added costs of transportation, which has helped make the price of food skyrocket because of the rising costs of oil and energy.”

Read the rest of our comments here.

Send to friends
Help us spread the word about sustainable food and what we’re doing here at Sustainable Table and The Meatrix. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends – and encourage them to get involved on our site. The only way we’re going to save family farms and be able to provide local, sustainable food for everyone is if we all join in and work on this together.

Stay in touch
Read The Daily Table, our blog!
MySpace – Moopheus & Sustainable Table
Sustainable Table on Facebook
See great pictures from our road trip last summer!
The Parlour, our forum