The People Behind
Bite Size Green

MB Austin
Writing Bite Size Green is a natural fit for me, as I grew up enjoying healthy food every day. Family gatherings find my sisters and I in my mother's kitchen, poring over cookbooks and designing meals to share.

As a kid, I knew that fresh food came from nearby places. Every spring, we turned the beds in our kitchen garden and all season long harvested greens, tomatoes, peppers - whatever we craved in the depths of February, poring over the seed catalogs. For the rest, our neighborhood grocery store provided semi-tropical delights like citrus from Florida, but nothing so foreign as an avocado. Truck farmers, parked a discreet distance from the supermarket, offered a seasonal bounty off their tailgates, like a mobile produce stand.

Packaged foods rarely entered the house; but we found them at friends' homes. We admired their sugar-bomb cereals; and they admired Mom's fresh-baked breads. I thought of processed foods as indulgences, like the rare stop for fast food on the drive to a day at the beach. No one went on diets in our house - we just ate fresh, homemade, really good food as a standard practice.

Not until I started learning about environmental issues did I think about the "green" side of healthy food choices - a lower carbon footprint, support for local economies, preserving fertile land and open space, etc. After a decade working for the US Environmental Protection Agency, the interconnectedness of all our choices was clear to me. After that phase in my career, I started this site, pulling together the bits and peices I had learned. Although I am an environmental professional, I am not a doctor or nutritionist; so I draw on good credible experts for what I state as fact, and provide links whenever I can.

Bite Size Green Community
Sharing healthy food is a community activity; and so is this site. The more I learn, the more I find new topics to explore, new recipes to offer, new things I'd love to have a photo of, and more books and movies I've yet to enjoy. So I welcome contributors to the site, and gratefully accept suggestions too.

My Other Sites
As much as I enjoy writing well-researched pages for Bite Size Green, I missed just being able to dash off a few lines on my latest trip to the farmers market, a marvelous meal, or whatever adventure in healthy eating the day brought me. So I started a fun food blog, also called Bite Size Green.

My next big project is a site that organizes all the key topics of green living - from renewable energy to voluntary simplicity to eco-conscious shopping - and provides layers of useful information. As you watch Green To-Do grow, you will find more than a basic introduction to each topic, or the usual "Top Ten Tips." You'll find enough detail to help you decide what action steps to take in your own life to save money, reduce your ecological footprint, and enjoy the simple pleasures of life.

My Site Host
I use a service called Site Build It to create and run my site. They take care of all the technical details, so that I can focus on the things I care about - growing food, cooking and sharing it, and writing. For me, the magic of SBI is being able to make income from the site, without getting it the business of web design, search engine optimization, and all that related internet voodoo.