In regards to Sustainability:Ask not what Cleveland can do for you, but what you can do for Cleveland.

No one is more aware or afraid of preaching one thing and practicing another as I am. I mean, I drive a car. A lot. To study sustainability...so I'm aware of my everyday contradictions. And I work on them.

Regardless, choices like your diet are very personal and at this point, if you have studied it, found logic in your decision, and actually live it consistently, then you have made it halfway there. The point is a sustainable diet is one that is active, that is informed, and that is made with a conscious effort to do right based on where all that information has taken you. I really don't care what you choose or don't choose to eat. It's the fact you actually considered it first that means so much-and that's mostly what sustainability demands: thought, getting people to think about their food choices. But there are parameters: buy local, the price must be truly reflective of actual cost, and organic is better and in the case of meat, grass-fed beef, free range, hormone-free and all that is what's best.With that said...

Michael Pollan's book "The Botany of Desire" is making me look at Cleveland differently and to tell you the truth, I'd look at Kazakhstan differently if I was reading this book while living there. It's just good enough to make me look at all the tulips blooming around the city (as a whole chapter in the book is devoted to them) and understand them a bit better.

Michael Pollan is pretty much the authority on the sustainable diet-and he isn't even a vegetarian. Nor did he pursue the title I just bestowed upon him, but nonetheless he deserves it and I find solace and logic in what he has to say about being an omnivore in a sustainable world.

If you have the time read something by him. I suggest starting with Power Steer, a New York Times series he did following one steer from birth to slaughter...and consider (since I make no direct reference to the city of Cleveland and local sustainability efforts in this particular post) how you as a Cleveland resident can make your daily choices sustainable ones.