How about a crowd-sourced sustainable cookbook?

We’ve been talking a bunch recently on here about the future of food writing—how is being affected by new media?  How come awesome food bloggers end up getting book deals, bringing it all back to the old fashioned paper format?  (i.e. will the future be jet packs and silver jumpsuits? or something more interesting we haven’t thought of yet?)

That’s why I am interested in this new crowd-sourced digital cookbook—Mastering the Art of Sustainable Cooking—produced by Brighter Planet and their online community. It’s got energy conservation tips, stories, and recipes from different submitters from around the country. I like the hodgepodge mix—how to save energy while BBQing (tin foil, baby); how the freezer can be your friend; stuff like that. I also like how it was made—reminds me of the old church cookbooks, spiral bound and community derived. It’s real short—not so very much there there, but it’s a cool beginning. Click here to check it out.

Brighter Planet is a web-based community that is all about getting people engaged in the fight against climate change. On the site, people can measure their climate impact—various actions are connected to carbon footprint numbers, and by tracking your actions you can watch your footprint change over time as you learn to live more carbon free. Also, it seems to be all about community—online community, that is.  So they’ve got a bunch of online campaigns, including the contest they hosted to create this cookbook (with an introduction by Gary Hirschberg of Stonyfield Yogurt).

One teacher’s brave look at school lunch

by intern Jackie Fortin [a closer look at the story we touched on in last week’s “Latest School Lunch News.”]

“Let’s think about what we give students to ingest,” says Mrs. Q, an anonymous Illinois elementary school teacher who is choosing to eat school lunch every day in 2010 and review the results in her blog, Fed Up: School Lunch Project.

Not one to “make waves” in her professional life, Mrs. Q considers herself a “whistleblower” for school lunch.

“I think every child no matter how much money their family has deserves to eat quality food at school,” she said. “Most teachers do feel the same way that I do … We’ve all discussed the lunches and how bad they are in passing. Then we go back to teaching. No one has done much.”

Mrs. Q’s project, which began Jan. 3, consists of buying a $3.00 school lunch Monday through Friday, bringing it back to her room for a ‘working’ meal, and taking pictures of each tray’s plastic-wrapped contents with her phone camera.

Despite her concealed identity, she admits to feeling “majorly exposed” and nervous about the traffic her blog is getting three weeks deep. “I could absolutely lose my job over this,” she wrote.

But the overwhelmingly supportive and encouraging comments are piling up. She has been interviewed by Small Bites blogger Andy Bellatti as well as by Robin Shreeves of Mother Nature Network, nutritionist Marion Nestle, Serious Eats, Chow.com, Food Safety News, Diets in Review.com, Treehugger, Grist  and several bloggers have all cited Fed Up in online posts.

According to Bellatti, the project, likened to “a more realistic Super Size Me…perfectly captures the problems of school lunch — poor nutrition, odd flavors and textures, environmental unfriendliness (plastic, plastic, and more plastic!), and the effects of cheap crop subsidies on individual health.”

More after the jump