Simple acts can have big consequences. To celebrate Earth Day, we have put together a list of 10 Ways to Eat as if the Earth Mattered:
Start with those changes easy to work into your life, or challenge yourself to adopt all ten. Either way you’ll be making a choices that benefit our one and only planet.
- Organic food. By choosing to eat organically, you can reduce the number of harmful pesticides and chemicals that get applied to our food, fiber, and animal feed crops, which means these chemicals stay out of our soils, out of our water supply, out of our air, out of our food, and off of our farmers.
- Local food. Local foods (foods grown or produced close to your home) don’t have to travel as far to get to your belly, thus reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned in transportation. Less air pollution, less damage to our soils and waters being drilled for oil, and less depletion of this non-renewable resource.
- In-season food. Consider the difference in food miles traveled between a February strawberry, typically coming Florida or California, and a July strawberry, which is available locally. Again, energy is saved in the transportation and storage process. You might also consider the amount of energy input needed to keep a hot house tomato plant thriving in the middle of a Maine winter vs. the energy needed to vine-ripen a tomato in the middle of August.
- A plant-based diet. Raising livestock and poultry on an industrial/factory scale requires inputs of synthetic medications, antibiotics, and chemicals to keep animals healthy, depletes the health of the soils where they are most often times confined, creates pollution problems related to the disposal of large amounts of animal wastes, and requires vast amounts of land-much of which has to be converted into pasture from native prairie and old-growth forests. Limiting your meat-intake, purchasing “pastured” poultry and meat products, or foregoing meat all together can help ensure that the earth can maintain diversity, health, and balance in its ecosystems.
- Food from small, family farms. Industrial fruit, vegetable, and grain production is not without its destructive consequences either. Large-scale agriculture also requires large scale equipment requiring fossil fuels to plant, weed, and harvest those crops. Big equipment can compact soil and deplete it of its vitality, leading to an increased risk of erosion or salinization (too much salt), neither of which are conditions that can sustain life. Restoring depleted soils and their fragile ecosystems is an energy- and input-intensive process.
- Fair-Trade Certified food. TransFair USA is a U.S.-based non-profit organization that certifies Fair Trade products based on decades old, internationally recognized standards which require producers to adhere to—and continually improve upon – sustainable environmental practices. Harmful agrochemicals, and GMOs are strictly prohibited in favor of environmentally sustainable farming methods that protect farmers, families and communities, and preserve valuable ecosystems for future generations.
- Avoid fast food “restaurants.” See above commentary on eating a plant-based died. Fast-food joints source their meat products almost exclusively from Confined-Animal Feedlot Operations (CAFO) and use a wide-variety of chemical and synthetic ingredients to preserve, flavor, and cook their offerings. These chemical ingredients (and antibiotics and hormones) are bad for you, and become bad for the planet once they have made their way through your digestive tract and taken up new residence in our soils and water where they may or may not biodegrade.
- Bring your own. . . . coffee mug, silverware, to-go containers, bags, etc. Keep them in your car so you can always have them on hand in case you find yourself hungry and with only disposable options for transporting your food or beverage of choice. And it’s really okay to bring your own to-go container to a restaurant. They might look at you funny the first time, but we can train them if everyone makes the effort, and think of all the styrofoam and/or plastic containers you can keep out of the landfill!
- Buy in Bulk. It saves a lot of excess packaging. For example, we open 1 25# bag of brown rice and recycle the paper bag that it has been sent to us in. If our customers decided instead to buy the pre-packaged variety, conveniently available in 1# packages in most stores, then there are 25 packages to throw away, which may or may not be recyclable or re-useable. When you bring your own container to fill again and again, then only one piece of packaging has entered the wastestream/recyclestream/landfill.
- Compost Don’t send those uneaten foodstuffs to the landfill to fester in amongst all those plastic bags. Turn them into the fertile basis for new life. It’s easy and rewarding. Don’t have a corner in the back-yard to grow a heap of black gold? Find a farmer, who will most likely be more than happy to take your food wastes off your hands. Find easy directions for getting started at www.howtocompost.org.
p.s. Remember when “50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth” was published back in the 1989? It was such a timely, useful, and empowering resource that authors John, Sophie, and Jesse Javna have recently put out a new edition, for sale at the Co-op.