Guest Blogger
Alexandra Zissu
Alexandra Zissu is a green living expert, environmental health journalist, eco consultant, speaker, and mom
She’s the author of The The Conscious Kitchen (Clarkson Potter, 2010 -- a Books For A Better Life Awards finalist), and co-author of The Butcher's Guide To Well-Raised Meat (Clarkson Potter, 2011), Planet Home: Conscious Choices for Cleaning and Greening the World You Care About Most (Clarkson Potter/Melcher, 2011), and The Complete Organic Pregnancy (Collins, 2006).
She has worked for New York Magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Lifetime and Details magazines, The New York Observer and Women’s Wear Daily. Over the past decade, her stories have also appeared in The New York Times, The Green Guide, Plenty, Cookie, Bon Appétit, Health, Vogue, Teen Vogue, Self, Child, Time Out New York, Harper’s Bazaar and The Huffington Post, among other publications. Recent articles plus blogs and more can be found at her website.
www.AlexandraZissu.com
What You Don’t Know: You Can Afford Well-Raised Meat
One of my absolute favorite things from The Butcher’s Guide To Well-Raised Meat is where we explain how to afford well-raised meat. So many people lament it can’t be done. I disagree. Here’s how I do it, excerpted from the book. Enjoy!
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Connecting the Dots
Our homes hum with electric power, and our neighborhoods are scattered with the poles and wires that deliver it to us. What’s less visible is the air and water pollution this system produces.
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How to Deal With Mold
THE QUESTION: Dear Alexandra, I live in a 17th Century building with very thick walls and lots of black mold. We Clorox-spray it off in the winter, but now have a newborn baby whose lungs are probably going to be black with mold before he picks up his first Gitane / or perhaps bleached with [...]
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What You Don’t Know: Kitchen Cleaners and Your Food
Many people will spend the extra dollar or two on buying organic, especially when it comes to poultry. Unfortunately, many are still using an army of questionable chemicals to clean their kitchen counters, cutting boards, and knives. Here is an excerpt from Planet Home: about kitchen systems and keeping your free range, organic, local, delicious [...]
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Storing Safely
Plastics are everywhere in the kitchen. And it seems that there are news reports daily on the hazards of hormone-disrupting chemicals found in plastics, which get into our food, beverages, and even baby formula.
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The Real Expense of Food
Many people complain about the price of organic food. An organic apple costs considerably more than its conventional counterpart at a supermarket. But here’s what is expensive about conventional apples: the ecological toll of the chemical sprays used to grow them plus the health toll of those sprays both on the orchard workers and the [...]
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Air Drying Week 4 & Conclusion
Well I made it through Week Four of the super fantastic cold-water washing/eco-detergent/air drying challenge. Because I have been trying to make this both an urban and a non-urban (i.e the yard of my parents’ house) experience, Week Four was meant to be a non-urban one. But we didn’t go upstate. So it was another [...]
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Air Drying Week 3
Week Three: Back In the City Life is busy and I hadn’t managed to buy a new rack before it was time to do my weekly two loads. We didn’t have much laundry so I vowed to dry as much of it as possible in the apartment.
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Air Drying Week 2
Week Two: Outdoors We went upstate to my parents’ house that weekend. I brought the PVC-stinky stand, and set it up outside in their yard to let it offgas overnight. The following morning, I put the first load up. It happened to be some of their gardening clothes and sheets.
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Air Drying Week 1
Week One: Indoors My first indoor attempt was curtailed by the drying rack Seventh Generation sent me to use. I opened it and set it up. It took up half my apartment. No matter. The metal base seemed sturdy enough and the ropes on top some sort of plastic. It didn’t seem big enough for [...]
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