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Welcome to Bluedot Living’s BuyBetter Marketplace, a biweekly newsletter that navigates the confusing world of stuff.
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Bluedot Living’s BuyBetter Marketplace newsletter includes affiliate links, including to Amazon. If you purchase a product through one of our links, we may earn a commission. These commissions help us fund the great journalism that you see on Bluedot. Thank you for supporting us! |
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Dear Readers,
Before I told people what shoes to wear — for a living, at least — I spent over a decade working in various arenas of the food industry. I managed partnerships for a hip food zine, ran early brand influencer campaigns, and did creative strategy for a produce company, where I spent a lot of time thinking about how to get Americans to eat more fruits and vegetables. But perhaps my favorite role of all was as the editorial assistant to Anne Willan, a multiple James Beard Award winner, cookbook historian, and a grande dame of French cuisine. |
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Anne, a true lover of cookbooks, has written dozens. When I worked for her, she and her husband owned about 3,000 — a collection I both physically and digitally re-catalogued. I grew to know many of the books intimately as I helped edit Anne’s 2012 book, The Cookbook Library: Four Centuries of the Cooks, Writers, and Recipes That Made the Modern Cookbook (available on Amazon). This beautiful, approachable volume traces the history of the medium in Europe, and I recommend it for any true cookbook lover.
This week, I’m going to share a few great contemporary cookbooks that will help you make the most of summer. While not overtly environmental in their themes, these books can help you live more sustainably by teaching you to approach ingredients — especially produce — anew. They all center meals around wholesome, fresh foods, and by teaching you to plan, preserve, and pair ingredients more creatively, these books can also help you avoid food waste. |
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Bon appétit!
Julia Child in her kitchen as photographed ©Lynn Gilbert, 1978, Cambridge, Massachusetts. |
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While summer remains a busy season for many of us, I hope you make the time to shop your local farmers markets, appreciate the beautiful fresh food they offer, and cook some lovely meals for friends and family.
Happy shopping and happy cooking!
– Elizabeth Weinstein, Marketplace Editor
P.S. If you, like me, find that you sometimes pass up your cookbooks in favor of online recipes, read on to learn how to best take advantage of the books you already own. |
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Save 15% off your first full-priced order from Nomadix with code BLUEDOT. |
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Portals to a Flavorful Summer |
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The Vegetarian Flavor Bible
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A personal favorite. This book lists hundreds of ingredients and dozens of compatible “flavor affinities” for each so that you can improvise intelligently, minimize waste, and just have fun cooking. (Depending on your diet, you may prefer the original Flavor Bible, or you could get both.) |
| SHOP ON AMAZON |
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The Gardener & the Grill
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Please don’t judge this book by its cover; it’s actually full of recipes that show us precisely how to get beyond the basics pictured. Buy it for yourself to build your grilling confidence, or give it to the person who could stand to mix things up on the ‘cue. |
| SHOP ON AMAZON |
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Eat Cool
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‘Tis the season for this charming book by frequent Bluedot recipe contributor, Vanessa Seder. In Eat Cool: Good Food for Hot Days, she offers great low- and no-heat recipes for drinks, cold soups, salads, desserts, and more. |
| SHOP ON AMAZON |
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AeroGarden Harvest Elite
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Wherever you live, however much natural light you have, you can experience the joy of growing fresh herbs, greens, flowers, and tomatoes indoors with the exceptionally easy and efficient AeroGarden Harvest Elite. Save 15% with code BLUE15. Read our review. |
| SHOP TODAY |
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Saving the Season
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Two or three moves ago, I owned a dozen cookbooks on canning and preserves. With every move, I scaled back, and this is the one I kept. It holds valuable insight for beginners as well as for cooks familiar with pickling and jamming. |
| SHOP ON AMAZON |
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New England Soups From the Sea
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New Englanders, do yourselves a favor and don’t get hung up on the word “soup”: Just go out to the docks for swimmingly fresh and sustainable seafood and cook it into Craig Fear’s positively summery recipes for boils, bisques, and chowders. |
| SHOP ON AMAZON |
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Dear Dot: Which is Worse for the Planet — Food Miles or Food Waste? |
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Dear Dot,
My eldest child signed up for Misfits Market, hoping to help reduce food waste. They were surprised to see items like strawberries and avocados on the list of available items, given that they live in New York State. One wonders whether the negative environmental impact of packaging and shipping misshapen produce around the country might outweigh the benefits of keeping those items out of landfill?
— Laura
Dear Laura,
Which is the greater eco-sin: To transport food many miles to be consumed? Or to fail to have it consumed at all, leaving it to rot?
When food rots, it releases methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas that can trap 120 times more heat than carbon emissions. What’s more, it isn’t just the methane emissions harming the environment, but the wasted resources and energy that went into producing, processing, packaging, and transporting the rotting food.
What about all the carbon emissions from trekking that yummy California strawberry to, say, Newfoundland? Surely that’s not good …
Well, no, not good, but also, perhaps surprisingly, less bad. Though let’s pause here to note that less impactful is not the same as zero impact …
Read on for Dot’s analysis of how what we put on our plates impacts emissions. |
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Sign up now for your daily musing and advice from Dear Dot. |
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Paid Advertisement
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Have you seen our previous BuyBetter newsletters? |
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If not, visit our site for a Father's Day Gift Guide as well as round-ups of linen clothing, underwear, green tech, items for better sleep, gifts for hosts, pantry staples, cookware and appliances, cold-weather clothes, clean beauty, laundry and food storage solutions, back-to-school favorites, picks for pups, baby showers, the beach, and summer clothes, products for picnicking and renovating, kitchen favorites, white sneakers we love, and household cleaning products. |
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Want to get in touch? I’d love to hear from you. Tell me about your favorite sustainable products, topics you’d like to see covered, or anything else that’s on your mind — email marketplace@bluedotliving.com.
I’ll see you again in two weeks.
– Elizabeth |
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Elizabeth Weinstein, Bluedot’s Marketplace Editor, lives in Manhattan with her husband; her papillon, Finley; and her cats, SanDeE* and Modell. When she’s not asking the folks at Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom to try on all of their sustainable sneakers in a size 9½, she can be found at the Union Square Greenmarket or gardening on her rooftop terrace. |
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The BuyBetter Marketplace and bluedotliving.com are published by Bluedot, Inc.
Find more simple, smart, sustainable stories at bluedotliving.com, our Martha's Vineyard website, our Brooklyn website, our San Diego website, our Santa Barbara website, our Boston website, our Toronto website, and our Los Angeles website. Subscribe to this newsletter here.
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