Mommy Greenest

Healthy Living, Less Judgment

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  • Home
  • Book
  • Categories
    • Healthy Living
    • Mommy Greenest Approved
    • Eco Beauty & Fashion
    • Natural Parenting
    • Latest Buzz
    • Green News & Events
  • Mommy Greenest Guides
    • Guide to Going Green
    • Guide to Eco-Friendly Fashion
    • Guide to Healthy Eating
    • Guide to Natural Parenting & Pregnancy
    • Guide to Green Beauty
    • Guide to Healthy Cleaning
  • About
    • Standards & Disclosure
    • Privacy Policy
  • pink himalayan table salt in a bowl helps you cook better
    Healthy Living

    One Simple Tip to Cook Better Forever

    December 17, 2014 /

    Do you assess your seasoning by how well it pours? Stop! So-called “table salt” is rock or ocean salt that’s mined, heat blasted, chemically treated and fortified with iodine until it’s devoid of all essential minerals and nutrients. Use this simple tip to cook better, forever!

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    Rachel Sarnoff 4 Comments

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    Today’s InspirApril Daily Affirmation: Happiness

    April 2, 2015
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    Cocktail Recipe Confession

    November 25, 2013
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    Today’s InspirApril Daily Affirmation: Answers

    April 11, 2015
  • heritage turkey raises wings against white background
    Healthy Living

    Is Heritage Turkey Worth It?

    November 6, 2014 /

    So you’re gearing up for Thanksgiving, the time when supermarkets practically—and sometimes, literally—give away turkeys in order to get you to shop in their stores. And unless you’re preparing for a vegan holiday meal, you’ll need to get your poultry order in stat. But then you look at the prices: This time of year, conventional turkeys can be purchased for as little as $.39 per pound, while at Williams Sonoma, a heritage turkey can ring up at nearly $200. Is it worth the price?

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    Rachel Sarnoff 13 Comments

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    Laila Ali’s Secret to Optimal Health

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    December 28, 2015
  • vegetable stew with salad greens and pomegranate seeds
    Healthy Living

    Jumpstart to Sustainable Food Habits

    November 15, 2013 /

    For years, I’ve been a total fan of Pamela Salzman, a certified holistic health counselor and a cooking instructor who shares healthful recipes and nutrition advice on her blog PamelaSalzman.com. A mother of three, Pamela lives in Manhattan Beach, but teaches all over Southern California. She has inspired me to create more sustainable food habits with my family. Want to join in the fun? Follow the advice that Pamela shared exclusively with Mommy Greenest in this post, or better yet sign up for one of her amazing classes! Much of the food we consume these days is a product of a broken and unsustainable food system. This food is dependent on…

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    Rachel Sarnoff 0 Comments

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    Must-Know Guide to Carbon Offsets & Global Warming

    April 9, 2015
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    Are There Drugs In Your Drinking Water?

    March 27, 2014
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    Today’s InspirApril Daily Affirmation: Strength

    April 24, 2015
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    Healthy Living

    Go Semi-Vegetarian! 2 Ways to Ditch Dioxins

    September 27, 2013 /

    My family is not vegan. We’re not even completely vegetarian. I serve the occasional organic, grass-fed hamburger, and I let them order conventional burgers in restaurants, if they want to. But I let my kids know that we eat very little meat—living a semi-vegetarian life—for one important reason: Dioxins. Now you may not have heard much about this group of roughly 75 related chemicals—unless you were an early adopter of alternative feminine hygiene products that touted their avoidance of the stuff. But I digress. As a parent, these are a few facts you need to know.

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    Rachel Sarnoff 30 Comments

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    Today’s InspirApril Daily Affirmation: Patience

    April 21, 2015
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    Is #Fluoride Dangerous?

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    February 15, 2016
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    Healthy Living

    More Reasons to Eat Less Fish

    May 14, 2013 /

    Stories about radioactive tuna from the 2011 Fukushima meltdown that showed up 6,000 miles away on California’s shores sounded too crazy to be true. The FDA said the radiation was nothing to worry about in the United States, since you’d have to eat pounds of the stuff before being affected. But according to a 2011 Government Accountability Study, the FDA only inspects .1% of the fish we import for consumption.

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    Rachel Sarnoff 2 Comments

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    February 18, 2015
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  • Healthy Living

    Sulfites and Wine: The Headache Connection

    May 13, 2013 /

    I love wine. Unfortunately, wine no longer loves me—the long headache isn’t worth the short buzz. But according to wine expert Olivier Magny, it’s not the wine itself that’s the problem, it’s the type of wine I’m drinking. Cheap wine. American wine. Sulfites in wine. Olivier, who has taught the art of sommelier-ing to more than 100,000 students at his Paris-based O Chateau, has a problem with sulfites and wine. “Wine should never give you a headache,” he told me. “Good wine—which in my book doesn’t mean expensive but does mean well made—is guaranteed headache-free.”

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    Rachel Sarnoff 16 Comments

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    Today’s InspirApril Daily Affirmation: Intuition

    April 27, 2015
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    Recipe Hack: Vegan Sushi

    February 9, 2015
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    Natural Parenting

    5 Rules to a Healthy Eating Habit

    May 7, 2013 /

    My kids are sick of healthy eating. They don’t want organic soybean butter and Farmer’s Market fig jam sandwiches, they want Lunchables: crackers, processed cheese, salty disks that pass for lunch meat and a whole lot of chemicals wrapped up in a plastic box. My younger daughter confessed she dumps the organic carrot sticks the trash (and I thought the ranch dip was decadent). My oldest has been trading her edamame for candy. Forget the veggie chips I carefully stowed in wax paper bags—heaven for these children would be to open up their lunch boxes and spy a bright-orange bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

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    Rachel Sarnoff 11 Comments

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    Natural Parenting

    What is BPA? 6 Ways to Ditch It for Good

    April 17, 2013 /

    In 2012, the FDA announced a nation-wide ban on BPA in bottles and sippy cups. The following year, California placed the chemical on its Proposition 65 list, officially recognizing it as a reproductive hazard. So what is BPA? Simply put, it’s a chemical used to harden plastics, especially polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins. Despite federal and statewide action, our kids are still being exposed to BPA on a daily basis. The substance is still found in hard plastics, food-can linings and cash register receipts. In that year alone, studies linked BPA to: 1. Obesity: White children with the highest levels of BPA in their urine were six times more likely to…

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    Rachel Sarnoff 26 Comments

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Welcome! I created this blog in 2008 as a resource for healthier living with less judgment. I'm a mother of three, former journalist, and co-founder of the (shuttered, sniff) sustainable beauty and fashion site EcoStiletto. I was Executive Director of the nonprofits The 5 Gyres Institute and Healthy Child Healthy World and appeared as a sustainable lifestyle expert on "The "TODAY Show" and "CNN Headline News," among others. Oh, and have you checked out my TEDx talks: Trash is Ruining Recycling and Can One Straw Change The World? Today, you can find me here. Let's keep in touch! xoRachel

https://youtu.be/sOol1MIgois

rachellincolnsarnoff

Things I learned recently. 1. Ritual works. A r Things I learned recently.
 1. Ritual works. A room, a desk, a coffee shop. Paper and pen or antique typewriter. Someone changes his shoes like Mr. Rogers before he sits down at his desk, another does visualizations. For months, I switched into writing brain by exiting my office, where my work desktop lives, and sitting with my laptop (wifi off) in a chair next to the window in my bedroom. I now recognize this as a ritual.
 2. Quality, not quantity. Maya Angelou rented a hotel room and wrote in it for six hours a day. (She asked the staff to take all the art off the walls, so she wouldn’t be distracted. And she drank sherry.) But many of us are working writers - by this I mean working at something else while maintaining a writing practice. We squeeze it in where we can. Currently, I get up at five so I can write for an hour before starting work at seven, a luxury made possible by remote work. I rarely have a concentrated stretch of time, and yet I keep chipping away at my novel, one paragraph or page (on a good day) at a time. 
 3. It’s a practice. Until recently, I didn’t believe that writing every day was that important. I would sit down and write for eight hours and then not for weeks at a time. (I was also a working co-parent of three children. So there’s that.) Now I’m trying to write every day, even just for 30 minutes. And what that means is when I’m doing something else — working or driving carpool or yoga or walking the dog or cooking or watching television — a part of my brain is still with those characters and re-entering the scenes is easier. 
 4. Writing is a tap you can’t shut off. Waking up in the middle of the night to scribble in the dark. Dictating a note to Siri in the car. Pinching your arm in a dark movie theater so you’ll remember a word when the lights turn on. Today I realized that one of my main characters has freckles and another needs to find a credit card and a third is smelling vanilla. All of these realizations happened while I was doing other things (see above). That’s writing, too. 
Right? 
#AmWriting
Exiting the @pacificmfa womb and headed into the w Exiting the @pacificmfa womb and headed into the world, proud of brilliant graduates including @allisuuunshines and @krazykenzer14 and honored to be on this path with @kburmz_ and @katiesumers and @rwrowe21 and too many others to name “jumping and dancing and skipping” and writing and reading and listening and thinking. I am profoundly grateful for this community and fellowship that is truly life-changing, and I read this poem TODAY which is further proof the universe is listening.
THE DAYS (abridged)
If only I could live my life, not write it,
I’d have double the experience
and be better at nothingness, at being present.
The page, I once believed, offers permanence,
sanctifying time, making it longer,
but now I see my words as susceptible,
even if digital, to fire, flood, misplacement.
To misinterpretation. To accidental
download by enemy. I don’t yet want them 
to be lost, but I dread the possibility
that they won’t self-destruct at the end
of my life, or the end of my lucidity.
Maybe I’ve been using paper all wrong,
committing to ink what should live in my head,
which is part of my body, which will not last…
Each night, I had written Here is what happened
like a kid whose pen makes her small life exciting,
then gone on mistaking the plot for the story,
as if the point of writing were writing.
-Adrienne Su “The Days” published in the New Yorker January 2/9 2023 (abridged)
#AmWriting #Memoir #Essay #Nonfiction #Fiction #WomensFiction #Stories #Story #WritersOfInstagram #Writer #Writing #WritingCommunity #PacificUniversity #PacificMFA #MFA
Searching for the sleeper wave. #amwriting #amread Searching for the sleeper wave. #amwriting #amreading #fiction #writer #writersofinstagram #writingcommunity #mfa
After the recent announcement of the fusion breakt After the recent announcement of the fusion breakthrough at Livermore — where my grandfather once worked as a chemist, that’s him on the right — many messaged me that the “climate crisis was over.” At the lab, lasers fused two forms of hydrogen into helium, which released more energy than it took to make it. And yes, this is amazing: Nuclear fusion releases no greenhouse gases and the waste is less problematic than what’s produced by nuclear fission, which is what my grandfather worked on. But the Livermore experiment — among many others — was able to produce just a small amount of energy and scaling its ability will take a lot of time, which we don’t have. Here’s what we do have: Wind and solar and regenerative agriculture, which are all eminently scalable now. As my grandfather might have said, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Photo: Bonestamp
#Climate #ClimateJustice #KeepItInTheGround #CleanEnergy #Motivation #MommyGreenest
I’m not big on resolutions, but I do believe in I’m not big on resolutions, but I do believe in ritual. Every New Year’s Day — and my birthday — I try to do the things that I want to be doing for the rest of the year. I spent the morning writing and then did some yoga and went for a walk with my family. I made posole for my son’s birthday party and ate said posole and it was delicious. I prepped a bit for work and played my guitar. All in all, an excellent start to another year. How about you? #happynewyear #newyear #resolutions #ritual
I have always been a writer. Published? Not so muc I have always been a writer. Published? Not so much. I published myself, obviously — MommyGreenest since 2008 woot! — but with other projects I tended to give up after a pass and internalize the rejection. But late last year, I read an essay by @elizabeth_gilbert_writer in which she described her process as tennis: Every time a story was lobbed back to her she sent it back over the net to another potential publisher. One in, one out. I took that to heart and each time I received a no, I swung harder. I still haven’t placed a story, but this year I published three nonfiction pieces — in the @washingtonpost, @nwreview, and @hippocampusmag. With encouragement from Kate McKean’s @agents_and_books newsletter, I submitted to over 50 agents who passed on my novel, but 11 requested the full manuscript and responded with notes (this will mean nothing to most people, but after enough time in the slush pile, querying writers gauge success by the detail of the rejection). No, this work is not lucrative and yes, it is a privilege to carve out the time and attention that it demands. Last spring, I was inspired by @jamiattenberg’s #1000wordsofsummer to schedule hour-long writing sessions, often at 5 a.m. before work, in order to chip away at a new novel that just topped the 50,000-word mark huzzah! Next week, I’ll join @pacificmfa peers in Oregon for my first in-person residency on the slowest train ever to an MFA. Cheers to all the creative people who can’t stop won’t stop trying to make sense of this reality through art. I am inspired by all of you.
#AmWriting #Memoir #Essay #Nonfiction #Fiction #WomensFiction #WritersOfInstagram #Writer #Writing #WritingCommunity #PacificUniversity #MFA
Finally c-positive, which is a negative, but the p Finally c-positive, which is a negative, but the plus side is a cozy blanket, knitted with love by a friend, and this amazing book, sent to me by my mother, which includes this wisdom: “…it strikes me as a particularly dangerous fantasy…that someone might be able to live without…heartbreak or sorrow. Which I’m pretty sure you only get to do if you have no relationships, love nothing, are a sociopath, and maybe, if you’re enlightened. I don’t know about you, but I check none of these boxes.” Love love LOVE. Who else is reading/has read? Let’s discuss! #amreading #rossgay #essay #nonfiction #inspiration
Los Angeles is full of magical places, especially Los Angeles is full of magical places, especially this time of year. We got dressed up and went to one of them. Highly recommended. Happy holidays, everyone!
When your daughter is doing the crossword puzzle a When your daughter is doing the crossword puzzle and you know both the answer and the person in the clue.
#JennaJambeck #Plastic #CircularEconomy #BreakFreeFromPlastic #Motivation #Health #Wellness #MommyGreenest
Obsessed. #Natural #NaturalBeauty #CleanBeauty #Be Obsessed. #Natural #NaturalBeauty #CleanBeauty #Beauty #Perfume #NaturalPerfume #HenryRose #NotSponsored
Slow and steady wins the race. #SlowAndSteady #Ha Slow and steady wins the race.
#SlowAndSteady #HappyHolidays #HappyHolidays2022 #AmWriting #WomensFiction #WritersOfInstagram #Writer #Writing #WritingCommunity
It’s inevitable — in December, we take stock. It’s inevitable — in December, we take stock. 2022 was full of surprises, but one constant was me on top of a mountain, wearing some weird assortment of sun protection and smiling. What happy place did you return to over and over this year?
#Health #Wellness #Hiking #Hike #Motivation #HealthyLifestyle #MommyGreenest
Tighter than a ____’s ass in fly time. You fill Tighter than a ____’s ass in fly time. You fill in the blank. #hemingway #amreading #amwriting #writer #writersofinstagram
All parents are proud of their kids. That’s just All parents are proud of their kids. That’s just what we do. I’m no exception. For the last three days, I’ve been listening on repeat to my son’s first album, proud as a peacock. But I’m also a music lover and a musician and I would love this album even if Gabriel — known on Spotify as Garb — hadn’t made it. This is a concept album: The songs follow the trajectory of a relationship and connect viscerally to all the raw and unfiltered emotions of first love. He is accompanied by incredible jazz musicians — known here as the Rags — from the Berkeley music program, creating this really interesting folk jazz fusion. I am proud of what he has created and also of how brave he is to put it out into the world. Please take a minute to click through, listen and — most important — please share. Link in bio. Thank you!
#Music #Singer #Songwriter #Songs #Garb #garbandtherags
Have you heard about the movement to #RebrandThank Have you heard about the movement to #RebrandThanksgiving? It’s a reminder to disrupt historical myths and honor the heritage of the #Indigenous land on which we live. Check out resources @IllumiNative and the map at native-land(dot)ca. Today and every day I am grateful to be living here, on native Chumash and Tongva land.
#IllumiNative #Thanksgiving #HappyThanksgiving
So proud to know @maryhelenstefaniak who has not o So proud to know @maryhelenstefaniak who has not one but TWO books out this year! I can’t wait to read this collection of essays, which @valerielaken calls a “treasure trove of marvels.” Both of these fantastic humans and writers are faculty at @pacificmfa. I am so inspired by this community!
#AmWriting #Memoir #Essay #Nonfiction #Fiction #WomensFiction #WritersOfInstagram #Writer #Writing #WritingCommunity
Opened Rilke to this. Who needs the I Ching? #rilk Opened Rilke to this. Who needs the I Ching? #rilke #writing #writer #writersofinstagram #reader #readersofinstagram #reading
My essay is in the Northwest Review!! This is a li My essay is in the Northwest Review!! This is a literary journal that I truly respect and admire. It’s one of the oldest in the country — they ran Ken Kesey’s first story in 1957! NWR has published Pushcart nominees, Best American Short Story winners, Stegner Fellows, and now me. I’m so proud that my compact little essay, “Morning-After Pill “Freebies” Highlight Abortion Divide” made the cut. Plus, that cover — amiright? Link in bio!
#AmWriting #Memoir #Essay #Nonfiction #Fiction #WomensFiction #WritersOfInstagram #Writer #Writing #WritingCommunity
You? #vote #voteblue #votelikeyourlifedependsonit You? #vote #voteblue #votelikeyourlifedependsonit
If you’re in Los Angeles, go see the extraordina If you’re in Los Angeles, go see the extraordinary #JoanDidion exhibit, curated by #HiltonAls at the #HammerMuseum. #Inspiration #AmWriting #WritersOfInstagram
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