This week’s encore presentation of Warm Pear Ginger Upside-Down Cake with Amaretto Whipped Cream is one of our all-time favorite recipes and the perfect addition to any holiday breakfast, brunch or dessert course. Crystallized ginger is the secret ingredient, adding sweet spice and warm holiday flavor to this festive and easy to prepare cake. Join guest chef and cookbook author Rebecca Rather, as she shares her delicious recipe—one that just might become one of your holiday favorites too!

Get the Recipe: Warm Pear Ginger Upside-Down Cake with Amaretto Whipped Cream

Imagine a wonderful green Christmas day. The scent of fair-trade hot chocolate fills the air as you sip from a recycled / recyclable cup. You look at your beautiful living tree with hand made ornaments and LED lights adorn the entire tree – thankful that your energy bill will not take a bite out of you this year. It’s easy to green your holidays, here are some simple tips!

Wrapping Gifts
Under the tree, sustainable gifts wrapped in recycled paper. Reuse the things you have around the house such as bags, boxes, fabrics, newspaper comics, magazines, and gift wrap from last year.

If you have to go with gift wrap, more sustainable choices include: tree-free paper available in woven grass, Lokta tree bark (made from the inner bark of the Lokta bush quickly re-grown in Napal), banana fiber (made from the bark of the Thai banana tree), spun silk, recycled office paper and recycled rag. You can also buy recycled wrapping paper.

Cards
Send an e-card or search the National Green Pages for cards made from kenaf, hemp, and other tree-free resources. Or instead of sending a card, make a phone call to a loved one.

The Tree
Christmas trees, lights, and ornaments are a classic tradition. If you don’t have a living tree, make sure you find a tree-cycling center after the holiday. Ornaments can be a very fun craft and reuse project for your friends and family made out of items that you normally recycle: paper towel rolls, old calendar pictures, and holiday wrapping paper. If you have any ornaments you no longer want from last year donate them to your local thrift store. Christmas lights can be a real energy consumer over the holidays.  Fight back the energy bills by using a timer on your tree.

Dinner
When buying your Christmas dinner, shop your local Whole Foods Market and support locally grown products to reduce your eco-footprint. Instead of buying all new paper and plastic products, use dishes, silverware and cloth napkins. Make sure you recycle post-party cans, bottles, wrapping paper, etc. and compost food scraps.

Thoughtful Giving
This year instead of buying that video game, movie, etc. for a loved one or friend, offer your time. Make them dinner, walk the dog, or help with things around the house. Or you can make a donation in their honor to their favorite charity or organization. Shop for green gifts over the computer and save gas. Avoid toys and tape made with PVC plastic. PVC contains a chemical called vinyl chloride, a known human carcinogen. Also, there is lead and cadmium in some PVC  plastics to keep it from breaking down – these ingredients can be particularly dangerous for children. To buy PVC free tape, check out this site.

Have a great green holiday!

Hayley Leibson is a high school freshman and a member of the Teens for Safe Cosmetics chapter in Marin, California.

I don’t know about you – but the words “potluck” and “cookie swap” incite my usually suppressed sense of competition and I suddenly become compelled to bring not only an amazing dish or dessert, but the most amazing dish or dessert. Our office cookie swap is coming early next week and I am panicked as how to make the most impressive, delicious, praise-winning cookies ever made by man, woman or Martha Stewart. So, this week, I’ve spent hours pouring over food blogs for tips on perfecting cut-out cookies, substitutions for special diets and other pointers for making show stopping treats.

Cut It Out!

While it would certainly be much quicker to make these classics as drop cookies, it’s all about the cut-outs, if you ask me. Endless varieties of cookie cutters catch my eye every time I find myself shopping for kitchen supplies, and now is the time of year I can put those impulse buys to good use. These shaped cookies can do more than just feed the stomach, but also treat the eyes, and quite possibly elevate one’s mood. The effort put into making these cookies into something special is what truly makes them a perfect gift. It takes a bit of patience, skill, and luck, but I have a few tips to help you get started in case you need some reassurance.

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Kathy Loftus, a limb-dwelling (as in “out on a limb”) mechanical engineer with a creative writing and communications bent, joined Whole Foods Market in 2006 to fulfill the Company’s desire to create a national vision and mission for an overall energy management strategy.

For many years, Whole Foods Market has had a Green Mission program.  It’s grass roots and supported at the top, and it’s helped us achieve incredible results in protecting our environment.  For the last two years, we’ve been coordinating a holistic approach to energy management as well as helping develop and share best strategies for facilities management, green engineering/building and reducing our overall carbon footprint and environmental impacts. While this strategic company-wide energy green vision was formally initiated a couple of years ago, we’ve led the way in moving the industry toward support for renewable and alternative energy and green building for many years.

I made a decision to join this group while, gulp, taking less pay, because I was stoked to help coordinate and realize the mission and maybe equally as important to work with people who care…about other people, their planet and good food…and not necessarily their net worth.  It’s sort of in their DNA to have this green mission, and it’s been snugly nestled into the ethos of Whole Foods Market for more than 25 years.

So why then, if Whole Foods Market is so committed, have we not scored well on some recent reports on green companies? A thorn in my side, to be sure! I know personally about all of our diverse initiatives, from composting and recycling to developing and maintaining quality standards and certifications like Marine Stewardship, Forestry Stewardship, LEED, Energy Star, Green-E (renewable energy credits) and on to sponsoring responsible packing forums and eliminating plastic bags and polystyrene from packages shipped to us from our vendors. How can these reports NOT show us as topping the list?!

Well, a lot of it has to do with tracking and reporting. We know our programs are making a difference but formalized reports need to see “before” and “after” data. We totally agree that makes sense and we want to be able to see those numbers ourselves. Being able to measure helps us identify other areas for improvement. Baseline energy usage or consistent access to usage information has been a challenge for us and it’s a key barrier for many companies who operate multiple locations across the country. That’s why we joined the EPA’s National Action Plan for Energy Efficiency to collaborate with utility providers and develop solutions for all companies like ours, but it’s going to take some time for that governmental process to work. We’ll keep helping there but since we don’t’ want to wait, we are now taking the initiative to work with a third party.

Board-level governance is another area of import for formalized reports. For example, some companies get high marks for creating positions like “Director of Sustainability.” As I mentioned before, we’re green to the core.  Rather than have one or several people at the top dictate what types of major goals will be achieved by a date far out into the future, we have people working on avoiding and reducing impacts every day.  We dream up ideas and work together to help the goals be realized.  For example, Whole Foods Market brought together 65 team members and leaders from around the country along with ten environmental experts last May for a Green Mission Congress, where attendees focused on identifying lofty yet achievable goals in the areas of green buildings, energy and water management, transportation, packaging and communication/education/awareness and outreach for team members and our communities.  A number of short and long term goals have been endorsed by all teams and are moving toward implementation.

I’m proud to work with people who constantly raise the bar.  Beginning years ago by providing foods in bulk (no packaging waste!) and recycling containers for our customer and then on through the years of work developing the national organic standards, we’ve been focusing on fulfilling our stated core value of caring for our communities and environment.

We continue that commitment today in a multitude of ways:

• Supporting Marine Stewardship Council seafood and Forestry Stewardship Council wood.
• LEED gold for one of our recently opened stores and have 20 plus stores registered with USGBC for certification at various levels.
• Banning plastic bags and polystyrene from packaging.
• Installing the world’s first fuel cell at a supermarket (Glastonbury, CT),
• Numerous solar installations in the works.
• Partnering with Department of Energy (DOE) to develop the Commercial Lighting Solutions Program and a host of other programs
• Moving closer to zero waste with many regions diverting more than 80% of waste by recycling and composting.
• Conducting Sustainable Packaging Forums with vendors and providing compostable food containers for our prepared foods venues.
• Implementing many energy efficiency programs: near real time enterprise energy monitoring and reporting (some sub-metering), installed doors on some medium temperature cases, testing LED lighting in refrigerated cases and other applications
• Feasibility testing of an on site wind turbine for the Pigeon Cove Seafood Processing Facility in Gloucester, MA
• Site renewable (waste to energy) energy project for the North Atlantic Region’s Commissary in Everett, MA

We’ve got a lot more in the pipeline, and I’m looking forward to sharing details about all of the great stuff we have going on in future postings.

If you are like me, you probably have at least two or three strands of holiday lights that were handed down from your mom when you were in college.  Some of the light bulbs are broken so the whole strand doesn’t work…but some day, in the spirit of reusing and doing your share for the environment, you were going to try to find those replacement bulbs and keep using those lights, right?

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Many of us throw parties and entertain guests over the holidays.  Maybe it’s my inner Martha Stewart – but even at my most casual gatherings, I want my guests to have a good time and be impressed by the food I’m serving.  This week’s customer tips are all about elegant entertaining on a budget.  From our Whole Foods Market brand Chocolate Truffles to using leftovers in inventive ways to ‘cheating’ and using our prepared foods section – Whole Foods Market has got what you need to leave your guests thoroughly wowed this holiday season.

Remember, each week, we choose tips to be featured in our weekly The Whole Deal™ blog post. Every chosen tip gets a $25 gift card, so submit you tips and recipes here.

From Kimberly:

I love Whole Foods Chocolate Truffles! They are a great value for a box and so yummy! For holiday get-togethers, I add the truffles to a platter of homemade cookies and it makes the desert so much more elegant – for only around $5!

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Dr. Bronner’s Magical Soap was one of the first Whole Body products offered at our original Whole Foods Market store in Austin, Texas in 1980. Over the years Dr. Bronner’s and Whole Foods Market have successfully grown their business in parallel, always committed to caring for the communities and environment around them. Today Dr. Bronner’s and Whole Foods Market have taken great strides towards improving the lives of producers in Third World countries with the fair trade certification of Dr. Bronner’s ingredients and the establishment of the Whole Trade Guarantee.

In shifting their supply chains to certified Fair Trade ingredients, Dr. Bronner’s makes a big difference in the lives of several thousand farmers and workers. Here are a few of their stories.

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“Thank you Whole Foods. Thank you for our new class room!”

Those are the words of a song written for Whole Foods Market by students in Ghana Africa.  The school was built because Whole Foods Market customers bought Blessing Baskets. Thank you for helping us weave hope into the world one basket at a time!

To see the global chain reaction you helped start, click here.

Note: These great baskets aren’t available in all of our stores. Sorry! Look for them in the Midwest, North Atlantic, Northeast, Rocky Mountain and Florida.

Learn more about The Blessing Basket Project and their mission to pay weavers multiple times more than Fair Trade wages for their baskets — calling it “prosperity wages.” Every basket they sell helps create sustainable jobs and helps reduce poverty in the villages they serve.

The Ellen Degeneres Show is celebrating 12 Days of Giveaways and lucky audience members today will receive holiday goodies exclusive to Whole Foods Market! Tune in to see all the fun.

Here’s what Ellen chose to give her guests:

FEED 100 Bag
In addition to being a great green alternative to paper or plastic bags, each purchase of a FEED 100 bag provides 100 nutritious school meals for hungry children through the UN World Food Program. The bags are not only made from eco-minded materials they are being crafted in one of the world’s few certified facilities ensuring fair treatment of workers, livable wages, paid overtimes, safe and clean working environments, benefits and vacation time. Learn more about these exclusive bags or order now.

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Located in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Bottomley Farms has been in operation since 1991 growing Christmas trees, pumpkins and vegetables. When Mitchell Bottomley was a child, he and his grandfather spent endless hours each winter tying evergreen garlands to sell for a little extra Christmas money. After his grandfather’s death in 1990, Mitchell turned that side-job into a booming business. In 2000, Mitchell Bottomley and his family expanded further, setting aside a small space on their family farm for pumpkin fields. That little space amidst a sea of evergreen trees has since grown to some 400 acres planted with more than 14 varieties of pumpkins.

Note: Our Farm to Market slide shows currently feature farmers and producers from our South and MidAtlantic Regions. We hope to expand to others in the future.