PB&J Campaign Blog

Every now and then we post about some food related environmental issue besides eating lower on the food chain (of course one of the easiest ways to shrink your carbon footprint, cut pollution and water use, and use less land), and this time it is food waste.

That food waste is a major environmental problem might be as surprising to you as beef as a major environmental problem was, but check it out - we waste about 40% of the food we produce. We waste it in production, we waste it in retail (think of all the eggs, bread, etc. that get thrown away the day after their expiration date), and more than anywhere else in the system, we waste it at home (60% of the waste)! The wasted food is a waste of all the resources that went into producing it, but they also cause pollution problems once thrown away. Check out this really cool post and ‘infographic’ from Next Generation Food in the UK to learn more.

We might not be able to to much right away about the waste in production and distribution, but we can do a lot about the waste at home. Think of all the times the milk has gone bad and you’ve poured it down the sink, all the times you stuck leftovers in the fridge in an anonymous container and forgotten about them until they grew a beard, all the times you bought the giant box of cereal but not finished it before it went really stale. All this is pretty simple to deal with. For starters, it is really easy to eat leftovers. You might label the containers, you might think more about leftovers as lunch, but leftovers are your friend! You might also buy in smaller containers - you might pay more per unit, but then you are paying more for the economy size when you throw half of it out when it molds or goes stale. Ultimately this is all about buying less food to feed yourself, which will save you money. You’ll help your wallet while you’re helping the planet.

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When we heard about the Good Magazine’s Healthy, Delicious Student Lunch contest, we couldn’t pass it up. After all, what’s the greatest lunch on the planet? That’s right, the PB&J, hands down. I’m not a student anymore, and it’s still my fall-back lunch; when I can’t think of what else (usually leftovers), it takes about a minute to slap peanut butter and jelly on bread, throw in some a carrot or some other veggies, and head to work.

The contest asked for a photo of the lunch plus a menu and an explanation for why it’s so awesome, and it required that the lunch cost less than $5 to produce. Five dollars? Please! How about less than $2? and it was only that much because it took two sandwiches to produce the two PB&J Boy and PB&J Girl cutouts; one sandwich would have worked (with the carrots and the glass of soy milk) for under a dollar. That raises a serious point - whether you’re having a PB&J, beans and rice, or a bean burrito, eating low on the food chain is probably the cheapest way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, save water, cut pollution, and use less land than you were before.

We’ll learn soon who wins the contest, but no matter what we all win with a PB&J for lunch!

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February is cold and dismal, and only the real dreamers out there are thinking about mid-April. I can’t say the PB&J Campaign had started planning for our big holiday, Earth Day, but we’ve been contacted by some smart, organized environmentalists interested in doing some college campus-based PB&J outreach to educate people about how easy it is to shrink your carbon, water, and land footprints one lunch at a time.

On our end, we have money (remember the Cause fundraiser in October? Thanks again everybody! And, of course, feel free to donate to keep supporting this work) to support these kinds of outreach projects. We can help provide brochures and other printed materials, as well as tee shirts, aprons, and even reimburse for food-handouts (yup, PB&Js). We only have so much money, so we can’t do it forever, but it’s there for just this purpose, so let us know your PB&J outreach project idea and we’ll see what we can do.

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I’ve been on a little okra kick lately, pairing well with my recent beans kick (rotating through the beans - wrapping up black eyed peas and moving on to red kidney beans and navy beans). Somehow I only just figured out that you can buy frozen okra and that it is really easy to cook.

Okra is another word for gumbo (or the other way around), and the word ‘gumbo’ got assigned to a stew made from okra, the vegetable being handy as a thickener.

The PB&J Campaign isn’t JUST about the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, however perfect America’s favorite sandwich might be, so check out this Zesty Bean Gumbo recipe at Meatless Monday (originally from My Recipes), another easy, low-on-the-food-chain meal that can cut your greenhouse gas emissions, water use, and your land and pollution footprints.

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You might suspect that PB&J Boy and PB&J Girl are actually inanimate objects, and technically, you’d be right. It might be nice to believe that there are supernaturally animated sandwiches striving to tell the world how easy it is to fight global warming, cut pollution, save water, and ease up on destructive land use, one lunch at a time.

Luckily there’s nothing magic about making your own spokes-sandwiches, or spokes-turtles out of sandwiches, for that matter. All you need is the cookie cutter for the shape you want, a freezer, and a PB&J. You pop the sandwich in the freezer long enough to harden the jelly and peanut butter (half hour), then use the cookie cutter. You might need to put the spokes-sandwich back in the freezer to firm it up so it can stand up on its own (extra peanut butter does provide extra structural stability).

If you’d like a photographic representation of the process, check out our latest PB&J Girl and PB&J Boy slide show on YouTube.

And, AND, AND! if you’d like to make your own spokes-sandwiches and have them deliver an environmentally friendly message through a YouTube piece, what’s stopping you? Feel free to pop us an email at pbj[at]pbjcampaign[dot]org for tips on how to make it work.

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Here’s one that seemed astoundingly obvious as soon as I read it: Blackened Tempeh with Avocado from our Meatless Monday buddies by way of HipsterVeg. It sounds maybe a little more fancy or involved than it actually is, but the principle is really, really simple.

One of the best ways to prepare almost anything (chicken, fish, tofu, and yes, even tempeh) is to dredge it in a mixture of spices and flour and then fry or bake it. You get the flavor from the dredging mix and then the coating creates this nice crispy layer on the outside to contrast with the juicy interior. What you come up with works well on a plate with some veggies and rice or on a sandwich.

You can mix up your own spices for dredging the tempeh, or (and this was the astoundingly obvious part I had nonetheless never thought of) you can go to the market and buy a mix, in this case a Cajun variety like Zatarain’s. No matter how you do it, this is a great way to fight global warming, save water, cut pollution, and help preserve habitat one meal at a time.

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Spokes-sandwiches are pretty darn cool - know of any other environmental campaign with spokes-sandwiches? If you don’t know them already, check out our YouTube page, chock full of their episodes and escapades, including their recent adventure with Captain Falafel, all ultimately showing you why and how you can make a better world (fighting global warming, cutting other pollution, saving water, and conserving habitat) one meal at a time.

But PB&J Girl and PB&J Boy aren’t all we got going for us. We’ve also got Miles! A little while ago our buddies at Meatless Monday invited us to submit a video for their Kids Cook web page. We immediately thought of my (Bernard Brown) friend Miles. Miles is a clever two-year-old who we knew would knock ‘em dead as a celebrity chef. So, we asked him (and his dad Scott and mom Caroline) if we could have him help us with a recipe from Meatless Monday, the PB& Vitamin A sandwich.

Will we go back to the spokes-sandwiches? Of course, they’re delighted to see Miles getting involved with the Campaign and don’t feel threatened in the slightest. In fact, we’re planning another shoot with all three of them collaborating on another dish.

So with out further ado, check out Miles rocking the PB& Vitamin A:

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Welcome to the PB&J Campaign! We’ve started posting ads on Facebook again, and if you’re clicking over here from one of our ads there, we invite you to check out the website, meet the spokes-sandwiches, and learn more about how eating a yummy plant-based meal like a PB&J (or falafel, or a bean burrito - check out our recipes for oodles of great ideas) can fight global warming, save water, cut pullution, and help conserve habitat - all while making yourself at least a little healthier.

Feel like setting some goals? Then take the PB&J Pledge to check out how some modest (or ambitious!) targets for yourself. If you dig the PB&J Campaign and want to spread the word about how much we can accomplish one meal at a time, join our Cause on Facebook, and invite your friends to join. The more the merrier!

We need to thank a Well Fed World along with all the Facebook Cause donors from last fall for the funds that are supporting this advertising drive.We can do a lot with ‘free’ PR and outreach, but the paid advertising helps us reach out just that much further.

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Necessity is the mother of invention, or maybe shortage is the father of creativity, or maybe just peanuts are your best friend, and olive oil ain’t bad either, so that when you blend them together, you get magic.

Megan and Hope in New York were working on peanut butter in their apartment, when they realized they had no vegetable oil. Peanuts have lots of their own oil, but sometimes it helps the food processing to add a little bit of extra oil and smooth things out. Recipes generally call for neutral vegetable oil, but it turns out that olive oil makes for some divine peanut butter.

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The PB&J Campaign loves the tofu hoagie. A rich, savory sandwich that’s pretty darn low on the food chain and pretty damn good. I challenge anyone in Philadelphia to find a tastier way to cut their carbon footprint, save water, reduce pollution, and use land more sustainably.

I (Bernard Brown) love the tofu hoagie so much that I wrote an article about them in the February issue of Grid (page 20)! The Fu Wah corner market’s sandwich was the starting point, but, on some tips from friends, I branched out to try a couple other versions of the tofu version of the Vietnamese Bánh mì (the sandwich’s proper name). The Fu wah remains my favorite, but that won’t stop me from eating either O Sandwiches (a great alternative to the nearby Pat’s and Geno’s) or Cafe Nhu Y’s if I’m in South Philly.

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