By Rachel Rappaport of Coconut & Lime

Earth Day is a time when even the least environmentally conscious among us think about ways to help the environment. One of the easiest ways to do this is to incorporate Fair Trade and organic foods into your diet.
Fair trade is both a social movement and a market-based approach to empowering developing country producers and promoting sustainability. Fair Trade encourages paying these producers a fair price as well as establishing social and environmental standards for the production. The most popular and widely available Free Trade food and drink items are coffee, cocoa, sugar, tea, bananas, honey, wine, fruit, and chocolate.

Ms. Adventures In Itay’s delectable strawberry semifreddo uses Fair Trade cane sugar. She says it worked great in her meringue and gave it a slightly chewy texture that she loved.
Cloudberry Quark uses Fair Trade cocoa and baking chocolate to make a chile-chocolate cake.

This Fruity North African Salad is gluten-free and uses Fair Trade honey.

The Buy Well Fair Trade Coffee blog has a great round up of recipes that use Fair Trade coffee as an ingredient, along with some other Fair Trade ingredients.

Organic foods are foods that are made with environmental goals in mind. The use of non-organic pesticides, insecticides and herbicides is greatly restricted and in most countries it may not be genetically modified. Most countries require farms to acquire licenses that show that they agree to the extra restrictions and monitoring required to be called organic.
A Cat in the Kitchen shared this recipe for an organic muesli made with organic freeze dried berries and corn flakes.

This recipe calls for organic bananas-which are only slightly more expensive than conventional bananas-and turns them in banana whole wheat cookies.

This recipe for organic carrot risotto calls for organic rice. Rice is traditionally a heavily pesticide-treated crop so it is always a good idea to search out pesticide-free rice when possible.

Looking for more environmentally conscious recipes? You can find them on the FoodieView Recipe Search Engine.

Rachel Rappaport is a food writer and recipe creator who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. You can check out over 600 of her original recipes at her award winning food blog, Coconut & Lime.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 10:09 pm and is filed under Recipe Roundup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.