Crucial Reading This Week

Hi dear readers,

Are you keeping your eyes open for berries? Here in the Northeast all the way down to the Mid-Atlantic, it’s that time where raspberry and blackberry bushes pop with free, organic berries for the taking. Because these brambles are some of the first plants to colonize an area after a disturbance (read: bare dirt after construction), you can find them ringing old farms and new parking lots, lining hiking trails and public parks, and fruiting right along the edges of your or your neighbor’s backyard! It’s a little bit of magic with no effort required except looking. (Which is why I’m always surprised when no one else has noticed.)

I’ve also been stopping by my local farm stand to pick up fresh strawberries, rhubarb and other delights. As I write this, my boyfriend is sprinkling spiced sugar and oatmeal crisp over a rhubarb and red currant cobbler. When this season is over, I’ll say goodbye to the berries, knowing they taste sweetest in season and that other seasonal delights await me. But for the average American, a plastic clamshell of tasteless, pesticide-covered strawberries in January from Latin America is just fine.

Berry picking is easy. A little more effort: Going out to a national forest with friends to go chanterelle hunting. Yes, we just drove five miles along the gravel road and would jump out when we saw pops of orange, but my friend has scouted this route for several years and knows it extremely well. He also knows lookalikes that could be poisonous. I’m so grateful that the US Forest Service isn’t spraying glyphosate here in Vermont’s national forests like it does in California’s popular mushroom-foraging destinations. From our bag of mushrooms—which would probably cost $100 at the store—we’re making a Vermont bacon, Vermont cheese, local red onion and foraged chanterelle tart to bring to a potluck tomorrow.

I hope you are finding your own version of free, outdoor, wholesome pleasures with friends and loved ones wherever you are these days. I have my regular link curation below for my paid EcoCult members. Thank you for supporting my work and research!

Not shocked: Shein again found to be toxic, this time via testing in Germany.

More than two-thirds of clothing in Europe can have toxic chemicals.

A study found that California and New York’s ban on PFAS in clothing worked! PFAS levels found in tested clothing plummeted.

Aizome is going to launch a new textile ingredient label for its products, which I think is very cool. (You know I think ingredient labels should be mandatory on fashion!)