Reading for Green Eating

Whether you're contemplating a vegetarian diet, thinking about planting a new tree in your backyard or considering a winter garden, new eco-foodie books are out to help you make some green decisions. Check out the reviews to see if you should pick up -- or download -- the whole read:

• Deciding between a ficus tree or fig tree? You’ll likely choose the latter after reading Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture by Darrin Nordahl. According to Jen Boynton at TriplePundit, Public Produce is “a book that lays out the public policy rationale for landscaping public lands with fruit bearing trees. Imagine if that shrub was replaced with an apple tree? It’s a pretty neat idea.”

• Thinking about starting a winter garden? According to Jeff McIntire-Strasburg at Sustainablog, Janette Haase’s From Seed to Table: A Practical Guide to Eating and Growing Green “not only provides readers with gardening instructions and tips, recipes and menus, and essays on the environmental issues surrounding agriculture and food production, but does so in a month-by-month structure that gives you the information you need when you need it.”

• Wondering if you should go veg? In an interview at Salon, Jonathan Safran Foer answers some questions about his book Eating Animals -- and says opting for farmers’ market meat is an “as effective a rebuttal” against the ills of factory farmed meat.