The Green Housewives of Bergen County
These three women are standouts, but not for table flipping, hair pulling or extravagant shopping sprees. They are too busy saving the planet, one eco-friendly step at a time—and inspiring others along the way.
Imelda McCain: Going green with natural toys
Just how does an oncology nurse become a purveyor of natural toys? Montvale resident Imelda McCain’s transformative experience was having a child. McCain came to the U.S. from the Phillippines in 1989 and spent 15 years working shifts at Mount Sinai Medical Center and then Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center in New York City before her son Lucas arrived.
“It’s like giving birth to another you,” says McCain, who lives with Lucas and her husband, a surgical oncologist. “You realize that even after you’re gone, there will still be some part of you on earth in that person. It causes a whole shift in awareness, and it redirected my life.”
Lucas, now 11, returned from the Green Meadow Waldorf School in Chestnut Ridge every day unwittingly bearing the seeds of inspiration in watercolors and branches and leaves made into collages and sculptures. McCain, who has no formal background in art, would tinker with found objects—and found ways to make them into toys.
In 2006, after visiting several craft and toy fairs to gather ideas and make contacts, she opened a toy shop in Nyack, N.Y., called Playing Mantis (playingmantis.com). It specialized in crafts, toys, and blocks that were chemical- free and made with natural materials such as reclaimed wood, water-based paints, vintage fabrics and natural cotton rather than plastic. A few years later, she opened a second shop in Tribeca and closed the Nyack location to focus exclusively on the Manhattan store. There she features handmade dolls from Kenya made from homespun wool; a mobile made of rainbow-colored dyed wool from Argentina; a Buscher Blocks puzzle which is made by a math teacher in upstate New York and is known as the “Fancy Cube”; birdhouses made by a family in the Catskills; and wooden puppet sets made by a music teacher in Hungary, among many other toys and crafts. There are even crayons made from plant dye and beeswax.
“We are all interwoven and connected,” says McCain. “And there are so many creative people who are very global.” When she’s not sourcing new products or checking on inventory, McCain can be found most weekends on her farm in Warwick, N.Y. There she and her family provide a home for 28 alpacas, three llamas, six sheep, four donkeys— many of these animals rescued—and several turtles who often lose their way, requiring relocation to the pond. On the farm, she tries her hand at sculpting felt made from alpaca wool.
Nicole Pietandrea Hough: Going green with organic food
Five years ago, when Ridgewood resident Nicole Pietandrea Hough still lived in New York City, her 6-month-old daughter developed severe food allergies, seemingly to almost everything she consumed. Hough’s quest to find food her daughter could eat safely morphed into a way of life.
These days she and her husband and two daughters eat exclusively organic food, the preparation of which she’s made into a family affair. Her 100 percent-organic holiday feast last Christmas featured a grass-fed goose from a local poultry farm, filo-wrapped goat cheese and spinach, braised apples and cabbage, figgy pudding and chocolate cake.
Hough and her husband are zealous composters, maintaining two separate bins behind the garage whose contents—vegetable scraps, fruit peels, eggshells, coffee grounds and the like—are in various stages of decay. After about a year of breakdown, she dumps the micronutrient-rich compost into her garden and lets it do its work. “It’s amazing the difference it makes,” she says, referring to the carrots, cherry tomatoes, lettuces, celery, beets, strawberries and squash she has planted in both nursery soil and her own compost. “The watermelons we planted in the pure compost were huge.”
Although Hough is an avid gardener, she’s no country girl. “I grew up in Ridgewood, not on a farm,” says Hough. Her dad was a doctor who maintained a large garden, she says, and her mom often made meals from scratch and insisted her children eat carob instead of chocolate. All of Hough’s working knowledge has inspired two new ventures. First, her prowess in preparing foods for her daughter led to the launch of Happy Maggie Foods (happymaggiefoods. com), which prepares by request meals that are free of nuts, soy, dairy, eggs, fish and shellfish, wheat, gluten and sesame. Second, Hough’s interactions with parents of food-allergic children have given her an insight into how uncomfortable people can be in the kitchen, especially when working with unfamiliar foods.
So, with partner Hannah Marcotti, she is developing an 11-lesson curriculum (available on DVD and online) instructing consumers on how to cook whole, nourishing foods easily and simply. Under the name Supper Heroes (supper-heroes.com), Hough and Marcotti will, for example, deliver how-to instructions on roasting a whole chicken, using the bones and skin to make a nutritious stock supplemented with vegetables, and then stretching the ingredients out to produce a week’s worth of meals.
Click here for Hough's recipe for delicious Coco-Date brownie bites that are healthy and gluten-free.
Leigh Merinoff: Going green with sustainability
Here’s what you’d find if you were to do a drive-by of Leigh Merinoff’s 200-year-old stone house and property in suburban Haworth: an apple and peach orchard; raspberry, blueberry and cranberry bushes; almond, pear and persimmon trees; a honeybee apiary; beet and cabbage plants; an herb garden producing calendula, dandelions and nettles; and an island of kale—300 or 400 plants all told. Attached to her roof are 32 solar panels, and scattered around the house are barrels in which she collects rainwater and funnels it through garden hoses into her greenhouse. Down in her root cellar she’s got a canning operation where she also makes maple and elderberry syrup, and upstairs her go-to appliances are her Vitamix blender and her dehydrator.
Merinoff’s agrarian experiment began in earnest in 2000 when she traveled to South America with her family and observed that subsistence farmers there were short on material possessions—but happy. It was the first time the M.F.A.-educated sculptor from Grosse Point, Mich.—a longtime traveler— began to see just how she, as “a creative person,” could live more sustainably. Returning home, she immediately enrolled in courses in biodynamic agriculture and herb gardening and began amassing—and reading— a 1,000-book library on topics such as organic farming, green energy, urban gardening and edible weeds. “You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to do what I’ve done,” says Merinoff.
Still, in 10 years she’s logged thousands of miles as an ambassador for Heifer International, a nonprofit group that seeks to end world hunger. She’s traveled to Honduras to observe the cultivation of African honeybees, to Uganda to study raw milk dairies and to Peru to see farmers raising chickens and alpacas at 7,000 feet. And all the while she has promoted the notion of teaching people to how to feed themselves—and equipped them with the tools they need to develop a sustainable source of food and income. Between trips, she’s given hundreds of lectures to schools, churches, rotary clubs, women’s auxiliaries and town halls, spreading the word about the greener way of doing things.
“Global sustainability is possible,” says Merinoff. “Ending hunger is possible. But we need a completely different paradigm— the monocropping system [planting the same crop year after year on the same land without rotation] is not working.” To advance her causes, Merinoff formed Moving Toward Sustainability in 2007 and Agroliving in 2009. These action groups are dedicated to promoting self-sufficiency at home and to highlighting the successes of Heifer around the world.
For aspiring urban and suburban gardeners, Merinoff recommends a few fundamentals: nutrient-rich organic topsoil and integrating crops “so as to emulate the diversity of a forest.” Her next trip will be to Tibet and the Yunnan province of China, where she will visit women yak farmers who are working with biogas, converting yak waste into energy to heat their greenhouses.
