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For years, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with local fish stores. It seems that every time I find a good one, the honeymoon only lasts a few months before things start to stink. When the air starts to smell, well, fishy and the whole fish in the case look like they have cataracts (a sure sign of being well past prime.) I know it’s time to move on.

A few weeks ago, though, I found a fish market near my home that I thought might be “the one.” Lots of locals had recommended it, but I kept passing it by, nonplussed by its locale sharing a parking lot with a busy beer store and cigar hut. But one day, a few weeks ago, I decided to try it after a particularly aggravating experience at the Wild By Nature fish counter where I waited for someone to show up for 10 minutes after being repeatedly promised he was on his way. Eventually I just walked out, but driving home I passed the fish market and decided to give it a go. After all, I had planned on fish for dinner and had no fish in hand.

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Regular canvas contributor Laura Collins-Hughes takes an herbal food tour through Chinatown and makes some observations on the way we eat and the way we heal.

In Western culture, the divide between medicine and food is generally unambiguous. Not so in Chinese culture, nor in New York’s Chinatown, where tradition recognizes herbs as medicine but also as food.

“There’s no distinction in many of the Chinese herb shops,” Letha Hadady said the other morning, leading a small gaggle of reporters and publicists through stores on Canal and Mulberry streets and the winding lanes beyond. Bins were stocked with medicinal mushrooms and fat twigs of ginseng root; jars were filled with fragrant loose teas and flower blossoms; packets of seeds promised a trip down a different garden path, lined with Chinese kale, bitter melon, Chinese cabbage, amaranth. Out on the sidewalk, women sold gingko nuts near a greengrocer offering fresh lotus and Chinese okra.

To people who do their grocery shopping in standard-issue American supermarkets, all of this is not just exotic but entirely unfamiliar. If you shop in health-food stores, you’ve been seeing many of these items for years, even if it’s only now that they’re creeping into the mainstream. But in Chinatown, the prices reflect familiarity: You’ll pay only a small fraction of what you’d pay for the same herb – maybe processed and packaged, but the same herb – in the vitamin aisle at your local health-food store.

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When considering how the world has largely become greener, I am, at turns, surprised, shocked, and pleased with the efforts individuals and corporations make to create a more sustainable and earth-friendly environment. I’m also often dismayed as the green movement gains momentum and those seeking to cash in hope to ‘greenwash’ their products and services, implying a sustainable message when there actually is none. We recently had this experience when a jewelry manufacturer sent us samples of bracelets made from all-natural materials. Indeed the products were made of natural materials—including endangered tropical rainforest wood.

Sigh.

Then today, I read something that had me amused and scratching my head: An eco-friendly wax portrait of the Prince of Wales.

As many of you know, Prince Charles of England is a fairly green guy. Well, at least as much as anyone who lives in a drafty old castle that takes gobs of resources to heat can be. He does get around in a “green car” and does try to minimize his travel so as to reduce his carbon footprint, even donating to footprint mitigating charities when he is forced, because of matters of state, to fly around the world. On his last visit to the U.S. he posed a plea for the great nations of the world to take action on the various environmental crises we are facing.

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On Tuesday morning my business partner, Matt, and I were on the way to a client meeting and were talking about various things.

I was telling him that one of my personal cars was coming off lease and my wife, Adele, and I needed to figure out what to do. The long and short is we downsized. We stayed with the same manufacturer, but chose a model that gets 20% better gas mileage, offers more interior seating space, has surprisingly good handling, acceleration and also has the AWD we think we need for those cold, snowy winters here on Long Island.

It was a hard choice filled with angst, stress, confusion before the moment Saturday morning when we decided to walk onto the lot and see for ourselves if the specs on the Internet about the interior space, could be true. They were and we ended up buying the vehicle.

We all fear the car buying process but our experience, for the most part, was pleasant except for the fact that no one likes to have to lay down a big chunk of money at once and we always feel we should get a better deal.

In the end we are happy with the purchase. In retrospect, I know that the moment the salesperson approached us out in the lot, before they had even officially opened; convincing us we didn’t need a six cylinder was a life moment. Once we drove the four cylinder we had to take stock and ask “why do we need the bigger motor we were originally going to get?” Beyond ego there wasn’t a good reason. Through this life moment we took one more step into the growing awareness that helped us develop canvas magazine.

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It’s a brave new Web 2.0 world out there. Time’s Person of the Year is (annoyingly) “You.” Theoretically, “You” are empowering yourself via the internet by blogging, comparison shopping, posting to bulletin boards, making new friends and business connections on LinkedIn and MySpace. Maybe you are even authoring web videos. It’s a wonder anyone has time to get in front of a stove to cook the family meal. We’ll, how about doing both? My friends at Realmeals.tv encourage the budding Mario Battali to break out the digital video camera and iVideo software, and start cooking. Submit your video recipe directly to the site, and enjoy watching yourself concoct an Apple Martini, make your own “DIY” wedding cake, or get dressed up like Elvis and make a peanut butter and fried banana sandwich that’s true to the King’s original recipe. Get a YouTube buzz going, and maybe someone with a yen for obscure cooking talent and a fat checkbook will make you the next Rachel Ray. It’s worth a shot.

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