FitHing and FroThing at the mouth for this week's delectable menu,

But to make it up to you, on Saturday, December 3rd from 3:00-5:00 we're having a FitH with two very special guests: Matthew Hoffman and Astrid Lindo. They're a young couple from Marin who've started the Living Seed Company. This is a video on seed-saving they produced for Positive Spin on Free Speech TV.  It's not the entire segment as it will air, but you can see a portion of it here.

Matthew and Astrid are helping me launch the Giving Seed Investment Club. For several years I've been piloting a way to create investments that support local sustainability and generate donations to global charities.

One of these experiments has been the I-Rise bread we've featured at FitH, which is FINALLY back on track this week after Gardner's back injury. It's been a long trek through the bread desert to get back to the mecca of wholesome grains! Gardner has helped us raise hundreds for Food in the Hood causes, along with being our faithful first supporter who said, "Don't give up. Things just take longer than you think." He was right and now look at us!

Matthew and Astrid are looking for "seed capital" in the literal sense of money to buy the seed stock and to print this year's packets. But they also share an interest with me in supporting global seed banks. Together we've come up with a creative way to combine growing and giving, along with a neighborhood class on spirituality that's not afraid to get down and dirty! Come hear all about it.

At the same time we'll be raising funds on Saturday for a West Bank Seed Bank in Palestine. Our friends at Grassroots International are partnering with the Union of Agricultural Work Committees who have established the first comprehensive seed library in Hebron, the West Bank's largest city.

To all the little FitHies in the deep blue sea,

This next week we start the chocolate holidays - Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day and Easter. So it's time for my annual child-labor-in-chocolate campaign. With our GirlUp group we watched the documentary The Dark Side of Chocolate. The girls were very moved and wanted to know why more people weren't aware of the children trafficked onto the cocoa plantations that supply Hershey, Nestle, Mars, Callebaut and others.

But we also felt that it was wrong to make kind people feel bad after they've bought candy for trick-or-treaters. So this year I plan to do what I did last year - make up mini-baggies of pink-yogurt pretzels, white yogurt almonds, and chocolate treats from Sunspire (who uses 90% fair trade chocolate, according to their manager.)

Part of the problem is that there aren't good, fair-trade, kid-friendly, novelty chocolates. We want slave-free chocolate, not chipotle-acai berry 90% cacao. So next holiday we're going to produce our own fair-trade treats, and see if we can get a local chocolatier to join us. In the meantime we'll be raising funds for the International Labor Rights Forum, where Tim Newman (no relation to Newman's Own) keeps the spotlight on the issue, with help from Global Exchange.

The FitHs are coming FatHst and Furious these days!

On Sunday the 25th at 4:00 we'll be having the last of our outdoor events for the fall-winter season. We'll revisit the Voices of Angels project in Jos, Nigeria, for which we raised $700 and donated several used laptops on April 18, 2010. Shannon and John Frediani will be on hand to tell us about the first computer lab and virtual library ever installed in a Nigerian high school. Our own Betty Devalcourt will also tell about her trip to the project.

All of our recipes this week are from Discovery of a Continent: Foods, Flavors, and Inspirations from Africa by Marcus Samuelsson, chef of New York's Aquavit. I bought the cookbook at Starbucks where they donated $1 of the $17 price to UNICEF. Samuelsson comes from Ethiopia, and features their cuisine. Coincidentally my daughters and I just watched the film Black Gold which features Ethiopian coffee farmers trying to get a living wage for their coffee beans, which may be the finest in the world. In one particular scene they interview a bubbly new Starbucks manager gushing about how great Starbucks is, which then cuts to an emergency nutrition center weighing critically malnourished babies.

When the film came out in 2007 I went into Starbucks in Santa Cruz and LA with letters asking them to pay fair-trade wages to Ethiopia. I'm not sure if they did or if this $1 to UNICEF was their answer.