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 me 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 pieces 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.

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. 

And I love where I live, so I write about that on Up The Creek.

Finally, steampunk tickles my funnybone and ignites my imagination, so I explore all aspects of the movement at Le Tour du Steampunk.
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