If you’re like me, you’re tired of the seemingly endless amount of bad news that our media offers up every day.  Read, watch, or listen to enough of it, and you’re liable to believe our world is an overwhelmingly scary, dangerous, hopeless place indeed.  Of course, if you dig a little deeper than the incessant, mainstream media drone, you’ll find positive sources of news like the “intelligently optimistic” Ode Magazine.

A print and online publication about positive news and “the people and ideas that are changing our world for the better,” Ode was founded in the Netherlands in 1995 and originally published in Dutch, but since 2004 it’s been available in English.  The print version appears ten times a year, and the blog is frequently updated.

More about Ode:

Over the past 12 years, Ode has helped make the ‘alternative’ media space more mainstream. The magazine profiled people like clown-doctor Patch Adams, guru Deepak Chopra and Dr. Andrew Weil long before more conventional publications made them household names.

During this time, Ode also built a community of readers who are passionate about the magazine and the issues for which it stands: positive social, environmental and economic change. Because these readers have a lot to say for themselves - and to each other- Ode created a new website that allows them to communicate, socialize and contribute to Ode. Odemagazine.com’s mix of print and online journalism with user-generated content and social networking makes it unique on the Web.

In print and online, Ode’s aim is to bring a new reality into view, to explore opportunities for positive change in our daily lives and our daily minds.

I’m a foodie. I don’t mess around. I was raised to appreciate a wide range of cuisines, from Cajun-Creole and Caribbean to Thai, Vietnamese, and Filipino, to Hungarian, Persian, Yemenite, and Ethiopian. See what I mean? For me, food is both a serious business and a passionate love affair. It’s how I travel the world when I’m stuck here at home. I do not take it lightly, and I’m lucky (and grateful) to have a lightning-fast metabolism.

I’ve probably spent a significant portion of my life thinking about where I want to eat, what I want to eat, and how I can recreate dishes like Bagali Shevid Polo and Masaman Curry at home.

Lately, my thought for food has inspired different food for thought.

I’ve become very interested in a different kind of ingredient list: specifically, what’s in the ingredients themselves.

I’ve started to wonder about pesticides, hormones, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). This curiosity led me to the discovery of a recent book by Jane Goodall, titled Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating (2005). Harvest for Hope breaks it all down in very simple, usable terms, offering anecdotes, profiles, history and a lot of insight into the world and workings of contemporary Agribusiness.

Goodall is a scientist, famous for her groundbreaking work with wild chimpanzees, but the book isn’t preachy or academic at all—which is good, since the subject of food can be as tricky and awkward to discuss as sexuality. As a lacto-ovo-vegetarian who is painstakingly careful about choosing free range, hormone-free, grain/grass fed, humanely raised dairy products and eggs, I can vouch for this.

What’s really great about the book is the way it puts power back into consumers’ hands. Our culture has lost touch with where our food comes from—and often what it is, and what’s in it. Harvest for Hope offers information about the healthiest food for people, and the healthiest food for the planet. The environmental impact of Agribusiness and Industrial farming, not to mention Global Supermarkets and the thousand of miles (think fossil fuels) that most products travel to get to them, is devastating and unnecessary. From Chapter 10, ‘Global Supermarkets’: “…Few of us realize that a typical ‘fresh’ food item in a North American household typically travels between 1,500 to 2,500 miles. Each year, food and agricultural products travel about 566 billion ton-miles within U.S. borders alone—not including imports from overseas—according to USDA estimates.”

Harvest for Hope offers simple, affordable, and fun ways to effect change. It inspired me to start shopping at my local farmers market, and now I make a weekly ritual out of it. It’s so much more enjoyable than a stressful trip to the flourescent-lit, buzzing supermarket. I’ve started developing friendships with local farmers, and have eaten some of the absolute best produce, eggs and cheese I’ve tasted in my entire life. The only food that enters my house (and most of what enters my body) is organic—and amazingly enough, it’s not draining my bank account.

It has also inspired me to consider the possibilities of starting my own teeny-tiny urban garden, joining a CSA, and just generally learning more about New Agrarianism…but we’ll save that stuff for future posts. Until then, pick up Harvest for Hope on Amazon.

It ain’t easy to effect good in this world, especially with a day job, a relationship, a dog, and assorted other time limitations. I would love to sign up as a Big Sister, volunteer with One World Health, or walk dogs for my local shelter, but it’s all I can do to make sure that my own dog gets enough exercise each day. Still…I’m determined to find ways, however small, to do my part. This past winter I did almost all of my shopping on The Greater Good Network and Green Glass, Inc., a company that creates recycled glassware from bottles. It felt good to know that in my own small way I was supporting organizations like The Animal Rescue Site, and helping to slightly reduce the immense waste of the holiday season.

This month, as a sort of Valentine’s gift, I got my mom a subscription to GOOD Magazine. I discovered GOOD in a Las Vegas airport sundries shop of all places. It was last September, and Matt had surprised me with an overnight birthday getaway to see the new Beatles-inspired Cirque du Soleil show, Love. We were in desperate need of reading material while we awaited our flight home the next day, so Matt took off to check out our options. I expected that he’d pick up an Us Weekly or some other fluff, but he returned with something much more interesting. It was the first ever issue of a magazine called GOOD, and it seemed to be both designy (I learned soon after that for each issue, GOOD asks an artist or group to set the tone for the magazine with a visual interpretation of the issue theme) and conceptually substantial. I grabbed it out of Matt’s hands and exclaimed something like, “Sweet molasses, let me get a look at that!” Yeah. This is the sort of thing that gets me excited.

GOOD proved to be super cool, and I was equally as (if not more) impressed when I discovered their mission and approach. Get this: When you subscribe to GOOD for one year, 100% of your subscription fee ($20) goes to the charitable organization of your choice. Subscribers choose from twelve organizations, which include Ashoka, Oceana and Unicef.

Awesome, right? So far I’ve purchased two subscriptions—one for me and one for my mom—and intend to keep giving them as gifts throughout the year. So there you go: it’s an armchair do-gooding option that keeps on giving.