Noted chef and author, Alice Waters is leader of a movement to change how Americans eat. (Photo by David Liittschwager)

Organically grown, locally sourced, and artisan-made foods taste wonderful, but Waters and the Slow Food movement are concerned not only with flavor, but with the health benefits and political implications of what we eat. As a result they have turned to what are called “SLO” foods (for seasonal, local, organic). “It’s not just thinking about what we’re eating,” says Waters. “We have to begin to question where it comes from, how it was grown. That’s the way we can make decisions that are good for ourselves, for our health, for the agriculture, and for our culture.”

Waters and Petrini, who joined forces in 2003 when Waters became vice president of Slow Food International, encourage the sensual enjoyment of eating. Petrini wrote of “a firm defense of quiet, material pleasure,” in Slow Food’s founding manifesto, and Waters’ efforts have been dubbed “the delicious revolution.” Indeed, the appeal of intensely flavored, farm-fresh, whole foods is Waters’ most effective tool in converting doubters who frequently level charges of elitism against the soft-voiced, delicately boned 68-year-old. Waters’ small stature should never be correlated with her might though. In 1995 she set her sights on a barren concrete schoolyard in her neighborhood and decided it was time to bring her message of mindful eating to those who needed it most: children. With the support of the principal at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, along with the Center for Ecoliteracy, the Edible Schoolyard was born. Today, its model of a school garden and kitchen curriculum is replicated nationwide, including at six “Founding Edible Schoolyards” in such locations as New Orleans and Brooklyn. “The reason I want to go in the public school system is so that we can reach every single child,” says Waters. “This is an incredible way to educate the population of America, whether they have money or whether they don’t.”

At the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley, head chef and teacher Esther Cook and director and AmeriCorps grad Kyle Cornforth are among the staff that lead children in lessons that integrate food into the academic curriculum. For instance, eighth graders study the mathematical concepts of percentages and concentration while preparing apple and carrot salad with sesame oil dressing. At the end of kitchen sessions, students sit around a table and enjoy their creations. Students in the program also have a chance to get physically active in the garden through such tasks as weeding and turning compost.

The goal of the program is to educate children so they understand the impact food has on personal health, health of the environment, and health of the community. In an age of increased childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes in pre-adolescents, programs like the Edible Schoolyard are seen as part of a larger public health effort to improve the eating habits of youth. Cornforth says that visits to the yard by leaders in the medical community have increased recently. But Edible Schoolyard teachers are careful never to lecture students directly about what to eat.

Slow Food pioneer Alice Waters (left) works with students at the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley, California. (Photo by Hannah Johnson)

“We’re increasing their awareness and interaction with fruits and vegetables,” says Cornforth. “We encourage positive behavior through group activities, fun activities. There might be 10 kids working together to prepare a green salad. They are working together to make the salad, but also doing their individual tasks. Kids have their own aha moments. We let that happen on its own.” Waters describes this approach as “an education of the senses,” and in the 17 years since the program started, staff say they’ve seen children “come alive.” A youngster who might not excel academically turns out gifted in the kitchen and earns new respect in the eyes of his peers. Other positive outcomes were backed up with numbers by a 2010 study by the Atkins Center for Weight and Health at the University of California, Berkeley. The study, commissioned by the Chez Panisse Foundation, found higher rates of fruit and vegetable consumption and increased nutritional knowledge among children who had participated in the curriculum versus those who had not.

Studies aside, Waters says that when people visit the garden “it feels as right as rain; it feels like every school should have this.” Slow Food USA president Josh Viertel couldn’t agree more. “We believe every child has the right to grow up knowing where food comes from, and to have a basic understanding of how to grow, prepare, and share it,” says Viertel. Slow Food in Schools is building school gardens, teaching cooking classes, and getting whole foods from school gardens and local farmers to school cafeterias. The group recently helped establish gardens, from-scratch cooking, and farmers markets at 60 percent of the public schools in the Denver area. In Miami, Slow Food set a goal to create 44 gardens in 44 days and ended up planting 63. “We are working to build more school gardens than McDonald’s has franchises,” says Viertel.

Most importantly, those working directly with kids in such gardens say they see how much students gain intellectually and emotionally from them. “There’s no 100 percent sustainable way to be on the planet,” says Cornforth, “but understanding how their choices affect things is very important. They start to see that there are trade-offs. They start to see the consequences of their choices.”

When it comes to raising children’s consciousness around food and combating childhood obesity, it turns out the carrot is the stick. And if Waters, Petrini, and company have their way, children will be savoring every crunchy orange, yellow, or purple heirloom bite.

[See Page 2 for recipes.]

A Better Way To Eat? The Saturday Evening Post

The terrain swoops and rises as I drive up North Carolina Route 86 toward the rural crossroads of Cedar Grove. By the time I reach Whitted Bowers Farm, it feels like the essence of American pastoral. I turn into the driveway on a December morning, passing trees that will soon be heavy with figs, plums, pears, and pomegranates. Goats nibble here and there. A large field looks tucked in for the winter, but underneath a woven blanket grow 20,000 strawberry plants. Further up stands an aluminum-frame greenhouse where globe artichokes have already begun their lives, bathed in classical music from a nearby boom box. I park in front of a modern farmhouse. Three dogs run up to greet me.

Rob and Cheri Bowers, who own this organic farm, welcome me with a mug of hot tea. Rob has spent the morning harvesting broccoli and Brussels sprouts from their cold-frame hoop house. When he and Cheri met in 2005—he’s 50; she’s 45—they were living in California and neither had ever farmed full-time. “Both of us were feeling a tremendous pull to walk around and get our feet dirty,” Rob tells me. They were surprised to discover a common fantasy of growing fruit through a sustainable method called biodynamics, which builds the fertility of the soil with limited use of imported materials. “Those are the kinds of coincidences that one needs to pay attention to,” he says. Within a year and a half, the couple was married with a six-month-old daughter and had found 52 acres blessed with good Carolina soil. Cheri had grown up near the site of their new home. Her mother and siblings lived six miles away.

Thriving transplants: The Bowerses moved from California to North Carolina to pursue their back-to-the-land dream. Photo Courtesy Whitted Bowers Farm.

“… energy, money, spiritually …” adds Cheri—

“… into this place,” Rob continues. “We really did want that experience of knowing what it meant to have a crop come in, and to feel what it meant to be reliant on what is basically a gift.”

If there was ever a time when consumer demand could support organic farmers like the Bowerses, that moment is now. Americans have grown savvy to the health and environmental benefits of foods produced without chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Organic food sales grew 7.7 percent in 2010 to $28.6 billion, more than ten times the growth rate for all food. Organics now command a 4 percent share of the total food market, up from 1.6 percent a decade ago. At my own farmer’s market in Durham, N.C., getting the best pickings means rising early and dodging the crowds. Likewise, community-supported agriculture (CSA)—in which customers get their food delivered straight from the farm—is flourishing. (To find a CSA near you, go to localharvest.org.)

Organic produce fills bins not only at self-consciously green megastores like Whole Foods, but also at traditional supermarkets and retailers like Wal-Mart. Health-conscious parents buy organic milk in cartons illustrated with cartoons of happy cows. There are organic wines, organic baby foods, organic pretzel bunnies. The Organic Trade Association, an industry group for North American producers and distributors, describes this explosion as a “cultural quickening.”

But along with this quickening come questions of what organic really means. Do strawberries from small farmers like the Bowerses fit under the same umbrella as the Surfin’ Strawberry yogurt tubes manufactured by Horizon Organics, a subsidiary of the $12-billion-a-year Dean Foods, the nation’s leading milk processor? How friendly to the environment are bagged salad greens shipped 8,000 miles from New Zealand or tomatoes grown in the Mexican desert? Are organic cookies healthy cookies? And in an era of industrial-scale production, can family farms in places like Cedar Grove survive?

Photo Courtesy Whitted Bowers Farm.

In the beginning it was more of a movement than a market niche.

Steve Gilman, a farmer in Stillwater, N.Y., can trace his own start in organics to the Vietnam War era and the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 70s. “There was a whole generation who had contact with a counter-cultural viewpoint,” he says. “It was a sane approach and a positive approach: Instead of being anti-war or anti-everything, it was being for something.” Organic farming embodied so many values of the era: community life, clean water and air, and the rejection of large, profit-driven industries like agrochemical companies.

Of course, farmers had been growing without synthetics since the dawn of agriculture. And decades before Baby Boomers like Gilman came along, modern organic techniques were being developed by pioneers such as Rudolph Steiner (who developed biodynamics) and the Rodale Institute. But growing anxiety about the planet’s well-being (think Rachael Carson’s 1962 wake-up call Silent Spring and the first Earth Day in 1970) helped set the tone for a more widespread embrace. So did news like the Alar scare of the 1980s in which the now-banned apple pesticide was linked to cancer.

In 1990 Congress tried to regulate the organic label by passing the Organic Foods Production Act. It took another dozen years—and fierce debates over issues such as genetic engineering and sewage-sludge fertilizer—before the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) set the official standards. From 2000 through 2008 the sector went gangbusters: Organic food sales climbed 15 to 21 percent each year, and organic non-foods like cotton were posting annual growth rates upwards of 40 percent.

Photo Courtesy Whitted Bowers Farm.

“This is where things started shifting,” says Gilman, policy coordinator for the Northeast Organic Farming Association Interstate Council. “A lot of corporations started to see that they better get something on board with organic. If you’re in any kind of business, you’ve got to have some skin in the game.”

Thus started the era of what author Samuel Fromartz calls “Organic Inc.” Kraft, Kellogg, Hershey, and ConAgra developed or acquired organic product lines. General Mills bought Cascadian Farm. Horizon Dairy, before its purchase by Dean Foods, took over an industrial-scale dairy in the Idaho desert to help supply some of the organic milk. Retail chains began selling organic processed foods: toaster waffles, frozen pizzas, and Oreo knockoffs. Large-scale vegetable growers, particularly in California, started claiming their portion of the fresh-produce market.

I talked with one of them: Jeff Huckaby, executive vice president of Grimmway Farms, the world’s largest carrot grower. In 1995, he told me, his company was concerned that tougher pesticide regulations would force it to shelve some of its most potent farm chemicals. So Grimmway set aside 300 acres for an organic experiment. “We found that, all right, we can do this,” he says. “It costs a lot more and the yield isn’t as good. But if they took every tool away today, we wouldn’t be out of business.” Anticipating the future, the company ramped up its non-chemical side and in 2001 bought a competitor called Cal-Organic.

“That’s when the organic movement took off, especially Whole Foods,” Huckaby says. “We happened to have the kind of acreage they needed to get larger volumes out to fill their stores.” Eventually, Grimmway put almost 30,000 of its 100,000 acres into organic production, spread over eight growing regions to assure year-round availability. It expanded its offerings to 70 vegetables. It attracted Costco and Wal-Mart as customers. “The larger retailers like the fact that they can come to one company and know what our growing practices were like, what our food-safety programs were like. And they knew that they could count on us—we probably would not run out. They were able to call us up and say, ‘Let’s figure out how to get Romaine lettuce 52 weeks a year,’ and we were able to supply that for them.”

Photo Courtesy Timberwood Organics.

Now, when you walk into a supermarket, the organic carrots you see are likely to come from Grimmway. The bagged organic salad greens will probably come from Earthbound Farms, which grows on nearly 37,000 acres in the U.S., Mexico, Peru, New Zealand, and six other countries.

“The grocery stores don’t want to be bothered with buying from tons of different companies. So that middle part of the supply chain is really concentrated,” says Carolyn Dmitri, a research associate professor of food studies at New York University. Organics are no different. “It’s almost like your success becomes your enemy. Once you’re popular and people want organic, the only way that it’s going to happen is if it blends into our existing food system.”

For some of organic’s boosters, this concentration is just fine. “Any acre converted from non-organic production to organic—even if it’s industrial—is a victory for the environment,” says Helge Hellberg, a California consultant who until 2011 directed a farmers’ association called Marin Organic. Hellberg used to be more of a purist. But he has come to believe that the highest virtue comes from getting synthetic pesticides and fertilizers off the landscape and out of our bodies as quickly as possible. “The greatest opening right now, in terms of numbers, is the school systems around the nation. It’s the Safeways, the Wal-Marts, and all the companies that add an organic line. The quantity these companies need—that will most likely not come from small-scale producers.”

It’s hard to argue against getting healthy food to more people or getting toxic chemicals out of the soil. Organic agriculture has the potential to be transformational—slowing down global warming and providing a more stable food source as extreme weather events such as floods and droughts increase. It will never achieve that potential if it remains the sole province of deep-pocketed foodies.

But the tradeoffs that come with Organic Inc. can’t be papered over. The biggest, perhaps, is the betrayal of the original intent of the movement. “Part of why many of us went to organic many, many decades ago was because of the kind of concentration and difficulty we saw in the agribusiness-as-usual model,” says Michael Sligh, the founding chair of the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), which advises the USDA. “Some of that has come to organic.” The big-business model puts more emphasis on efficiency—and less on local production, animal welfare, and long-term sustainability. In December The New York Times published an article about organic tomatoes grown in Mexico’s arid Baja Peninsula, a practice that guarantees year-round availability in the U.S. but also depletes the desert’s scarce water.

Photo Courtesy Timberwood Organics.

What’s more, some large organic animal operations look strikingly like the factory farms they were supposed to supplant. The Cornucopia Institute, a Wisconsin-based advocacy group for family farmers, recently investigated the organic egg industry and discovered aviaries housing up to 85,000 hens, “wall-to-wall, floor to ceiling,” with minimal or no access to pasture. “How can that be,” asks Mark Kastel, Cornucopia’s co-founder, “when the law clearly states that all organic livestock must be able to exhibit their natural instinctive behaviors and have access to the outdoors?” Last year, the USDA started requiring better outdoor access for organic cattle. It’s considering the same for poultry, though the proposed minimum standard for laying hens would be less than one-twentieth of the space the European Union mandates.

And the status quo remains slippery thanks to the industry’s political power. “The lawyers and lobbyists for big ag are in D.C. every day, influencing the regulators,” says former NOSB chair Jim Riddle, organic outreach coordinator for the University of Minnesota’s Southwest Research and Outreach Center. For example, the USDA keeps a list of non-organic ingredients that can legally be used in organic food processing. Originally it was designed for such basics as baking powder. But the list has grown lengthy, and there’s constant pressure to add more exceptions. Sometimes industry loses—as when the USDA rejected a request to allow a large bakery to spray their organic English muffins with an anti-fungal preservative. But not always. For example, organic breweries successfully petitioned the government to allow them to use hops treated with synthetic pesticides. (The USDA plans to lift that exemption in 2013.) Sausage makers can use casings made from the intestines of animals raised with hormones and antibiotics. “All kinds of things have been allowed that don’t seem to me to fit anything organic,” says former NOSB member Joan Gussow, a professor emeritus of nutrition and education at Columbia University. “This small hole that was made for things that seem acceptable has been gone through by all kinds of materials.”

The danger lies in devaluing the organic label, says Sligh, who is also a director of Rural Advancement Foundation International. “We have to be exceedingly careful,” he says, “that we don’t end up undermining the golden goose by this pressure to ever create more and more sophisticated processed foods.”

Healthy plan: Ray Christopher of Timberwood Organics bypasses long food supply chains by selling to the people who eat his produce. Photo Courtesy Timberwood Organics.

Not surprisingly, Organic Inc.’s growth has also touched family farmers. Some have seen their traditional sources of income dry up as their commercial clients turn to larger suppliers. I talked with Ray Christopher, who runs Timberwood Organics, a 12-acre farm in Efland, N.C. Until a decade ago one of his most reliable customers was a nearby Whole Foods Market whose buyer assured Christopher that his vegetables flew off the shelves. But then “it got back to corporate that she was buying from me at a high price, and they could have been making a lot more money if they were buying from California,” he says. “Because of the bottom line, it got canned.”

I heard several stories like this. “We used to have a robust restaurant business,” says Tom Philpott, co-founder of the non-profit Maverick Farms in Valle Crucis, N.C. Philpott started the educational farm—which uses organic methods but (like many small growers) is not USDA-certified—in 2004. “A couple of years in we started getting feedback from restaurants: ‘Look, we can get organic baby greens shipped in from California for cheaper.’” One national distributor promised to shave 20 to 30 percent off Maverick’s best price. So the local farm stopped supplying restaurants. “We’re not interested in taking on that type of competition,” says Philpott, who blogs about food for Mother Jones magazine.

The good news is that small farms are nimble. Timberwood and Maverick have ramped up their community-supported agriculture programs and command decent prices by delivering fresh produce to customers. Both sell at farmers markets too. This is how organic family farms will survive: by bypassing long supply chains and dealing instead with the people who eat their food. “It’s a personal relationship: ‘If you buy from me, I’ll be here tomorrow. I’ll be here next year. I’ll respond to your needs. We’re in this together,’” says Minnesota’s Jim Riddle.

That intimacy is precisely what has kept Rob and Cheri Bowers afloat since they moved to Cedar Grove, N.C., in 2006. Their biodynamic growing method goes beyond mainstream organics. They rely heavily on compost and do intensive soil preparation using herbs, seaweed, fungi, worm castings, and manure to “create a living fertility in the soil,” Rob says. They limit even organic fertilizers brought in from the outside. They use cover crops intensively. And they orient their work by lunar and astral cycles—in order, they say, to take advantage of phenomena like the moon’s gravitational pull on the Earth’s water.

The Bowerses started by selling to a wholesale distributor, which in turn sold their produce to Whole Foods. “We didn’t like how that felt,” Cheri says. Nor did they like the price markup they saw at the supermarket. After a year, they pulled back, and now they sell at a farmers market and to nearby restaurants. During the spring, they open their strawberry fields as a U-Pick operation. By eliminating the middlemen, Rob and Cheri say they have kept their prices competitive with (and occasionally lower than) conventional produce sold at supermarkets. Even when they do charge more, customers remain loyal. Rob tells me about one weekend during the 2011 strawberry season when Whole Foods ran a sale on non-local fruit that undercut his price by almost two-thirds. “Ironically, that was a record weekend for us,” he says.

Part of their success stems from the quality of their food. The Bowerses sent me home with a bag filled with speckled-trout lettuce, baby Romaine, and two types of bok choy. Not only was it super-fresh, but the flavors were extraordinarily complex. “We’ve had people come to the market and say: I don’t know what it is about your stuff, but it feels alive,” Rob says. But there’s also something less tangible. “In this country everybody’s disconnected with their food. Their relationship is more through packaging and marketing.” But when people pick their own organic strawberries, that relationship changes. “It reconnects people in a way that they need.”

It will take more than U-Pick strawberry operations for organic farming to radically improve our planet’s health. But as we re-imagine agriculture, one would hope small farms like the Bowerses’ remain a vital part of the mix. The money they earn stays in the community. The farmers markets where they sell their produce bring neighbors together. They provide the story behind our food, filling a primal human need. And in a country that is becoming ever more urban, they serve as stewards of a diminishing treasure.

“One of the most incredible blessings is just to be able to become intimate with a piece of land over the course of a year and to see every day how it changes,” says Rob. “I always joke with Cheri: ‘We’re not farming this land. It’s farming us.’”

The Organic Food Paradox The Saturday Evening Post

In her 90-year-old, colonial-style Indianapolis home, Sara Snow easily rattles off how she religiously follows the tenets of green living. Dressed in pants made of wood pulp and an organic cotton shirt, this up-and-coming eco-friendly expert is among the true tree-huggers, “greenies” —her words—who do everything they can to live lightly.

All the food she and Ryan, her husband, buy is organic or natural, including the herbal tea she’s sipping. She uses cloth bags for purchases. Their German shepherd, Makana, eats natural dog food. Their bath towels, bed sheets, and bathrobes are made from organic cotton. She points out pieces of second-hand furniture —a small table, decorative tubs made of recycled tires. The natural living advocate advises shopping at local farmers’ markets for fresh produce or joining a community supported agriculture (CSA) group for a regular share of local, healthy crops.

They use natural cleansers—such as baking soda and vinegar—non-toxic shampoo and soap, and energy-efficient light bulbs. Behind the garage are two compost bins for tea bags, banana peels, and the like. Around front are curb-side recycling bins they regularly fill up. Her “green” list could go on, but the picture is clear.

This outgoing 32-year-old TV series creator and host on Discovery Networks, columnist, and new book author embodies the essence of what it means to live naturally, in tune with nature and the environment.

Her life is focused on spreading the “green living” gospel, ingrained in her as a child, to help other people make simple life changes she hopes will contribute to a sea change in their own health and the well-being of the environment.

“My mission is not to become some massive superstar and to have this whole empire built around me,” she said. “My mission is being on the ground and helping people find ways to live more naturally, so they can have healthier bodies, healthier children, and healthier homes. It’s so immensely important.”

Snow’s new book outlines a room-by-room guide to a more environmentally friendly home. Yet what we all need to do, she says, isn’t remarkably new. And it doesn’t have to be all that hard.

“We’re not inventing a new way of doing things. We’re really going back to the way we used to do things less than a 100 years ago. That’s why sometimes I call it simple living.

“We didn’t used to spray our crops with so many chemicals; we didn’t used to abuse our resources the way we do now; we didn’t used to view everything as being so disposable as it is now,” says Snow. Her first book, Sara Snow’s Fresh Living: The Essential Room-by-Room Guide to a Greener, Healthier Family and Home, comes out in March. Snow wants people to know that green living doesn’t have to be all or nothing. That’s a mistake a lot of people make, she says. They can take small steps, get comfortable with them, and move on to others. Living greener can be as simple as starting to cook at home more often, rather than going out so much, because you’ll likely eat healthier, she says, also adding to remember how your grandmother or mother made dishes, the food they cooked. Do some of those things. Buy locally grown foods and grow some of your own. Also, be intentional about not overbuying in general. Buying secondhand goods also helps cut down on needless waste, Snow says.

To make the biggest impact, Snow advises taking steps in three areas: eating less processed food and more organic food; cutting back on your home energy usage; and improving your transportation methods so you’re using less energy.

Organic products are still between 10 percent and 20 percent more expensive than nonorganic food, although in-season, local organic produce may not be any more expensive. If you can’t afford to buy all organic, Snow suggests at least buying organic milk (easy to find) and buying meat that’s hormone- and antibiotic-free.

Sara Snow’s Green Living Tips for the Home

In the kitchen

• Shop often to avoid overbuying of processed foods and to keep a steady amount of fresh foods on hand.
• Buy organic to avoid pesticide exposure and increase your antioxidant intake.

In the bathroom

• Buy recycled-content paper products like tissues and toilet paper.
• Take shorter showers and save up to five gallons of water per minute.

In the bedroom

• Try organic cotton sheets for a comfy and healthy, natural bed.
• Look for eco-friendly materials like organic wool and sustainable bamboo.

In the nursery

• Simplify and avoid overbuying for a clutter-free and environmentally sound nursery.
• Seek out natural body products for your baby’s sensitive skin.

In the living room

• Place energy-efficient CFLs (compact fluorescent light bulbs) in your most commonly used fixtures.
• Make use of secondhand furniture for a more eco-friendly choice.

In the laundry

• Avoid cleaning products with synthetic fragrances.
• Line dry your clothes, either inside or outside, for an energy-efficient laundry room.

In the office

• Avoid getting excess mail by asking catalog companies to take you off their lists.
• Unplug electronics like computers, printers, and televisions when not in use so they don’t waste power.

Throughout the home

• Use common plants to clear the indoor air, which is often more polluted than the air outside. Plants like gerbera daisy, English ivy, and bamboo palm are effective at helping to clean the air.

Outdoors

• Try composting as a way of recycling kitchen scraps into free fertilizer for your home gardens.
• Get a tune-up on your car to get the best gas mileage possible, no matter what kind of vehicle you drive.
• Install a rain barrel on a downspout of your home and make use of what comes down naturally to water your plants and gardens. The barrel can be store-bought or simply a recycled old barrel with a spigot installed toward the bottom.
• Become a member of a community supported agriculture (CSA) group for a weekly share of a local farm’s fresh and healthy crops. If you don’t have CSAs in your area, shop at a local farmers’ market for the best seasonal, fresh, and local foods.

Even though her life was quite different from her public school classmates’, she never felt deprived, nor did she envy the more typical foods they ate while she drank soy milk and munched on carob bars. Her parents taught her food can be used as medicine to make your body well, or it can do some serious harm.

“We felt like we were really a part of something big. At least there was a purpose behind it all, and my dad was helping to save the world through food,” recalls Snow, chuckling fondly. The knowledge she gained while growing up shaped her career. Snow is a graduate of Butler University in Indianapolis in telecommunications and theater performance. She worked as a television producer for ESPN’s SportsCentury series and then as a morning news reporter/ anchor for the Indianapolis Fox affiliate. But the lifestyle didn’t suit her, so after seven years she left to blend her life’s work with her life’s passion—green living.

In 2005 and 2007, Snow created and hosted two eco-lifestyle series, now shown in reruns on Discovery Health and FitTV. They’re called Living Fresh and Get Fresh With Sara Snow. Segments profile how companies and real people are living greener lifestyles. She also has regular segments on CNN.com LIVE; has her own Web site, sarasnow.com; is developing another TV series; and hopes to write another book. With all the attention on green living in the country, what’s holding people back? “Sometimes I think the hardest thing is just the first change, breaking the mold and changing your habits,” says Snow, an advisory board member for Discovery’s Planet Green, the first-ever, 24-hour green television network. “Once you’ve made that one change, the rest are much easier.” Snow is optimistic about the future of the green movement 10 or more years down the road. “At the very least, we will have slowed the rate at which we are destroying this very fragile planet.”

Snow is impressed by the environmental awareness of college-age Americans and even more by younger children. She believes that by the time they are running companies and households, if we aren’t already seeing serious changes, we will by then.

“My hope beyond that is we will start to live less as little selfish individuals in our own little bubbles,” she says. “We don’t interact with our neighbors; we don’t spend time outside interacting with the natural world.”

As for herself, Snow would like to recreate that idyllic time when her family members relied on each other, supported each other, and lived close together.

“My personal hope is that I’ll be back on a little family community, and all of my family will be living in a plot of land together. It’s such a perfect way to live.” From Sara’s Kitchen:

Going Green with Sara Snow The Saturday Evening Post