As some of the recipes I've been writing about recently probably suggest, I've been looking for ways to make some healthier adjustments to my diet - not just for personal health reasons, but also because in this day and age I believe it's everyone's responsibility to think about how their food (and by that I mean food purchase) choices have a broader impact. I was quite pleased, on Saturday, for instance, to pass over some very good looking strawberries in the Fresh Market when I realized that they had been shipped in from California and South America.

Now, of course I know that both those regions produce very good strawberries, but I'd just filled up my gas tank the day before (to the tune of $50.00) and - still stinging from the outlay, I couldn't help but think about the amount of fuel it had taken for those strawberries to get to Tennessee...

And because one thing tends to lead to another, I then wondered just how long those strawberries had actually been trapped in those little plastic cartons...and how "fresh" they really were. And while I am certainly no skinflint when it comes to paying for ingredients (as every modern girl knows, quality is far more important than quantity), there's nothing I dislike more than paying top dollar for a pound of strawberries that start molding before you've even got them out of the store.

You get where I'm going with this of course. Suffice to say it's a whole new way of shopping. But here's the thing, it's not that painful. In fact it's not painful at all. Sure it saves you a few dollars on strawberries that probably wouldn't have lasted more than a day anyway. But it's also smart. And more to the point in this day and age, right.

If you're interested in reading more about "food miles" -- the environmental and financial cost of food based on the distance it has to travel to get to your plate - as well as how the rising cost of fuel is having a direct impact on food prices, the New York Times is running The Food Chain, a series that "examines the growing demands on, and changes in, the world's production of food."

In the series' most recent article, Elizabeth Rosenthal deals with the "Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World,"  - and reveals how some of our best-known and most "affordable" grocery chains - like Wal-Mart and Tesco - have some pretty obscene shipping practices (how does sending fish halfway around the world for cleaning, then all the way back again for sale sound for environmental responsibility?).

This isn't the only article about these sorts of practices - the NYT ran a great article last summer explaining food miles, and The Sustainable Table offers enough information, resources and ideas to make every modern girl an expert on the topic. Check them out before you hit the check out!

Another quick bite from K/BIS 2008 (hard to believe it's been two weeks already!)...These SMEG fridges are gradually making their way into the American scene, and as you can see by their playful palette, they're just about irresistible!

I saw this little story on the Today Show Tuesday and thought it was worth finding and highlighting here. Annie Bell Muzaurieta of The Daily Green shared five super-easy ways to "green" your diet -- and they're all beautifully simple:

1. Buy organic as much as you can. For most intelligent cooks - and eaters - these days that's pretty much a given. Or at least I hope it is. After all, it's one of the most responsible things you can do for our food supply, our health and our planet...If the wallet doesn't stretch to all organic, however, Muzaurieta provides some guidelines to help make the right choices.

2. Eat local. As Muzaurieta reminds us, the average food travels 1,500 miles (yes, one thousand five hundred) just to get to your kitchen...and to your plate...put it in those terms (and then think about the price of gas today...almost $4 a gallon around here) and two things become immediately clear - one, the sheer waste of energy that comes with buying an apple produced on the other side of the country (or world) versus buying one grown a few miles from your own doorstep and b) the reason food prices are steadily increasing along with gas prices...

3. Go Brown. Add in whole grains like brown rice (see last week's brown rice salad frenzy!), wheat, barley...check out my new fave cookbook, Super Natural Cooking for a few great ideas to get started.

 4. Opt for an organic wine. This is a fast-growing area of green food - and Muzaurieta does a nice job of explaining that  organic wine is produced from grapes grown without synthetic pesticides (and that some wines can't be labeled organic even though they're produced with organic grapes because the producer adds sulfites to it).

5. BYOB - that's bring your own bag. I've got a nice - and growing - collection of great shopping totes, but still, who knew paper could be just as negative as plastic?