Green Child Magazine Summer 2012 | Page 18

Green Child Magazine Green Living Expert & Mother S “Authentic” is one of the first words that comes to mind when you listen to Sara Snow speak about green living. Growing up in the 70’s, Sara lived in a passive solar heated home and ate fresh foods from her extended family’s organic garden. As an adult, she spent seven years as an Emmy-Award winning television producer. Turning her experience and passion into her life’s work, she created her own TV series, Discovery’s Living Fresh, and later Get Fresh with Sara Snow. After authoring her first book, Sara Snow’s Fresh Living, she settled into her current job – mom to her now toddler daughter, Sylvia. : You were raised with an emphasis on sustainability a few decades before it was popular. Can you tell us more about your family’s “back to the land” movement? Sara: It certainly wasn’t as popular back then as it is now. I grew up in a home that was very much “green,” in a time when people weren’t really thinking about living in a green way. My dad (Tim Redmond, founder of Eden Foods) was one of the people helping to make the natural food movement happen. Because of that, my parents taught my three siblings and me to be mindful of the food we ate, to live as low impact as we could, and to not take 18 from the earth more than we could give back. We grew as much of our food as we possibly could. The rest came from my dad’s natural food store, Eden Foods, in Ann Arbor Michigan. Eden Foods has since become one of the largest international distributors of natural & organic foods. When I was two years old, we moved to an area outside of Ann Arbor to live in a way we were surrounded by nature and family. There were 40 acres situated around a lake and forest that we shared with my grandparents and my aunt and uncle. It was incredible - like our own little family commune.