Emily Gertz

When food writer Lisë Stern needs fresh vegetables to roast with a chicken, she bicycles to the green market near her Cambridge, Mass., home where local farmers sell organically grown produce. Once back in her kitchen, she prepares the meal using knives, bowls, utensils, a cutting board and a roasting pan dedicated solely to cooking with meat, and serves it to her two teenage sons (her 11-year-old daughter is a vegetarian) on glass plates never touched by milk, cheese or other dairy foods.

Stern, the author of How to Keep Kosher: A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding Jewish Dietary Laws, is one of a million or so American Jews (out of around six million total) who keeps her kitchen year-round according to the laws of kashruth, or kosher. She's also interested in the environment. So how does keeping kosher contribute to--or undermine--her efforts to go a little lighter on the planet?

Read the article at Scientific American online.


Photo credit: Me

With Tropical Storm Kay putting swaths of Florida under water, our thoughts naturally turn to wondering how to most accurately predict the intensity of the hurricane season.

...[T]he Georgian army is one of the most prepared in the post-Soviet space.  In large part thanks to [its] Western friends.

Most Georgian officers and ordinary infantry have been trained in the US and Turkey, or under instructors from these nations.  Under the American program, more than eight thousand Georgian infantry.  Over the past four years, military expenditures have grown 30%, accounting for 9-10% of GDP (in Russia, 2.9%), and the overall military budget for 2008 is almost one billion [[rubles? dollars?]]  This is quite a lot for the state, which is receiving a significant part of military-technical assistance from abroad.  Among the countries providing such aid to Tblisi are: the US, Turkey, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Israel, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Ukraine.

Panic has ebbed about the recent Midwest floods, but commodity prices continue to stir worry as everyone waits to see how the corn and soybean crops will fare.

Is it possible to accurately predict this kind of unnatural disaster?

Enter a research team at St. Louis University, which is creating an incredibly detailed, 3D projection of the Upper Miss -- every building, every parking lot, every levee.

As Flood Waters Rise, Geeks Aim to Save Midwest With 3D Rig

My article ran in Popular Mechanics on June 19.

My notes from a panel held this evening at the Museum of American Finance in NYC:

There's a point where "black is the new green" needs to meet a bit of regulatory arm-twisting if we're going to see more than a fraction of a fractional progress to cleaner greener anything.  And in practical terms, that point -- or those points -- are to be found in a city's zoning ordinances and building regulations.  

Eventually they grow up and you've got to let them go: at Grist.org, the special series I've been researching, reporting, and lead editing for the past three months has left the barn. "The Corps of the Matter: A special series on the Army Corps and the Mississippi River" features great contributions by Time's Mike Grunwald, fellow SEJ member Jenny Cutraro, Wired Magazine infoporn/"What's Inside" meister Patrick Di Justo, author Mike Tidwell, photographer Mark Hirsch, and three articles by yours truly -- all of us backed up beautifully by Grist's production team, and story editor Katharine Wroth.

The collage I contributed to Wandering Moleskine #13, is to be included in Scrapbooks: An American History, by Jessica Helfand, to be published this fall by Yale University Press.