Green Options » diet

Change Your Diet, Change the World: A Recipe for Eco-Friendly Eating

Justin Van Kleeck — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:00:30 +0000

As the human population continues to skyrocket and conditions on planet Earth get (proportionally) more troubled, we have heard about a lot of ways we can change our lifestyles to lessen our impact on the biosphere. Yes, we know that changing our bulbs to CFLs is great; we know that driving hybrids is great; we know that reducing, reusing, and recycling are all great. And they surely are!

However, one essential aspect of our human lives that often does not receive much attention is our diets. This is rather shocking, too, because whatever else happens, whatever we stick in our lamps or drive, we always need to feed. And as more and more of us pop up on the planet, Mother Earth is going to have a lot of hungry human mouths to feed.

Your dietary habits–what, where, and even how you eat–are profoundly important when it comes to sustainable living. I am not an accredited expert on economics, agriculture, or nutrition, but I have done more than my fair share of research on these and other topics (especially the latter two) related to sustainable food choices. In what follows, then, I share some ingredients I have come across in a recipe for an eco-friendly diet.

Eat simply. Packaged foods that have ingredients lists spanning several sides of the box, with words you cannot pronounce and substances you never thought could exist, are obviously not “natural” and can do funky things to your body. Plus, the more things in your Frankenfood, the more resources required. Simple eating gives your digestion an easier task and reduces your exposure to potential toxins, too, which ultimately helps keep you healthy.
Choose organic. Although an organic label does not guarantee good farming or business practices by the company/producer, you can at least be sure that an organic product will have required less chemicals and toxins in order to go from field to table. Besides reducing pollution going into the biosphere, you also reduce pollution going into yourself with organic foods.
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Edible Activism: Changing the World Through What We Eat

Megan Prusynski — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:44:20 +0000

For as often as we do eat, it seems as if most of us don’t think too much about what we’re putting into our bodies. With food production so far removed from our every day lives, it’s easy to ignore where our food comes from and what it’s impact may be. But what we put on our plates has a larger footprint than what we drive. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,

“Livestock production is one of the major causes of the world’s most pressing environmental problems, including global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Using a methodology that considers the entire commodity chain, it estimates that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport.”

The things we choose to eat can obviously have an enormous impact on the planet and everything on it, including ourselves. Naturally then, our diet choices can say a lot about our ethics and beliefs. They can even be a political statement and a form of activism. I think that every choice we make has the potential to change the world, and certainly what I choose to eat has an impact.

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Eat Strategically to Save the Planet: Advice for Pregnant Women

Alan Greene, M.D. — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:56:38 +0000

More than four million acres of American farmland have already been dedicated to organic farming, helping our health and our future. That’s four million acres farmed without the use of toxic pesticides or other toxic chemicals; four million acres nurtured with both ancient and modern techniques that are in balance with nature, helping to reduce the production of greenhouse gasses and reduce the threat of global warming.

Growing our foods organically has proven to be one of the hottest, fastest-growing movements of the twenty-first century. When Congress passed the Organic Foods Production Act in 1990, there were fewer than one million acres of organic farmland. In just twelve years, by 2002, that figure had doubled. Then the pace of progress picked up. Within just three more years, the amount of organic farmland doubled again. In 2005, we saw, for the first time, certified organic farmland in all fifty states. There has been exceptional progress, but we need to do more.

If organic cropland continues to double—and it can!—we can expect to see a revitalization and renewal of our streams and our soil as we build a smart, sustainable future. I can remember drinking stream water in our national parks when I was a child. I can remember catching and eating fish from our local streams. Today, all of the streams surveyed by the U.S. Geological Survey and more than 90 percent of fish tested in farming regions are polluted with pesticides.

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Reclaim Your Plate! The Sustainable Food Diet

Caroline Savery — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:38:38 +0000

The jury is in: the most sustainable way to feed yourself is to grow your own food.

There are many factors considered when evaluating food sustainability. The primary concern is: what is the ratio between how much land is used, and how many calories are produced?

In asking this question, we can immediately eliminate meat from our sustainable diets. Pigs and cows are extraordinarily “inefficient converters of grain energy to calories,” as put by the executive director of Steel City Biofuels, speaking generally about fuel efficiency. In her presentation about Organic Farming during Pittsburgh’s Farm to Table Conference 2008, Dr. Patricia DeMarco, executive director of the Rachel Carson Homestead, noted that raising meat in the U.S. comprises 79% of all agricultural resource usage. While the health benefits of going vegan will be endlessly debated, at least doing so will be much more healthful for our environment.

The next question naturally becomes: how can we grow food in a way that nourishes the soil, produces a vast yield in a little space, and is maintained by nature?

Surprisingly, all of the above is easy to do, if you’re using the right methods. John Jeavon’s book “How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible” describes the biointensive method: growing food tightly together in ways that foster symbiotic relationships between plants, like those that would organically occur in nature. For instance, marigolds ward off common insect pests for their companion plants, tomatoes. But biointensive gardening is more than just knowing companion plant lists and spacing maps.

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The “Sustainable Fitness Plan!”

Caroline Savery — Sat, 24 May 2008 22:58:26 +0000

Lose ten pounds in just three weeks!

What does it take to get results like that? Trying to live in harmony with the Earth!

Today marks the 24th day I have attempted to live environmentally sustainably. I sleep in a used tent, bike anywhere I want to go, volunteer biweekly at Landslide Community Farm, and eat wild edible greens, farmer’s market fare, and dumpster-dived goods.

When my parents learned that I was going to try such an “extreme” experiment as trying to live 100% sustainably in urban Pittsburgh, they did not try to dissuade me. However, I began receiving e-mails and calls from them, saying: Did I go to the doctor yet for my poison ivy? Am I checking for ticks regularly? How about I don’t eat food out of dumpsters? While all good-natured questions, they expressed a typical parental concern that the situation I am currently in, while important, actually jeopardizes my health.

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European Union Defends Biofuel Targets As Food Prices Soar

Clayton B. Cornell — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:57:24 +0000

Despite intense debate surrounding the growing global food crises, the European Union today defended expanding the use of biofuels in all 27 member countries. Part of the EU’s climate change package, the current proposal sets a target of meeting 10% of transportation fuel with biofuels by 2020.

As I reported last week, Europe’s EPA advised suspending the EU’s biofuel targets until a comprehensive environmental analysis could be completed. Barbara Helfferich, spokeswoman for EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas, said no way is that going to happen:

“You can’t change a political objective without risking a debate on all the other objectives,” meaning that changing biofuels targets could lead to questioning the entire climate change package.

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“Perfect Storm” Inflating Food Prices Worldwide

Clayton B. Cornell — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:24:18 +0000

Adding to the ongoing discussion about biofuels affecting worldwide food prices (see Biodiesel Is Raising Food Prices), NPR’s Morning Addition briefly interviewed World Bank President Robert Zoellick last Friday.

Zoellick called it a “perfect storm of things coming together…” and listed 7 different issues contributing to the increasing cost of food, which led to rioting in Haiti and Egypt last week, along with a general strike in Burkina Faso:

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Eat Food. Not Too Much. Translated.

Beth Bader — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:07:39 +0000

So, when Michael Pollan set forth his short mantra on food, what did it all actually mean when you go to fill your dinner plate? For starters, we eat too much in general, and too much of the wrong things. Following are some very specific guidelines on actual portion sizes, and tips on eating right without dieting. I hate dieting.

First, some general “gut checks” you should keep in mind daily:

How many servings of each type of food we should eat each day
All the different colors and kinds of veggies, and if you are eating a variety
Small meals and healthy snacks work best for moderating blood glucose levels
When is best to eat, and what combinations of foods are best for you (eating proteins with carbs to balance sugars for diabetics, for example)
The true size of a portion, and sticking to it
The tremendous amount of healthy food you can eat for the same amount of calories as a small bit of unhealthy food

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Secrets to Selecting Produce

Cheryl Tallman — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 01:42:29 +0000

We all know buying fresh is best, but when it comes to shopping for fresh produce, it is not always easiest. In fact, it is a little tricky and can be time consuming. Here are a few of our secrets to shopping smart for the fresh stuff in the produce aisle.

Buy produce that is in season: Foods that are in season are at the peak of freshness, flavor and affordability. If you don’t know if an item is in season, ask the producer manager.

Buy locally grown produce: Even the big grocery stores buy local produce, and you can also buy local produce at the farmer’s market or straight from the farm. Depending on where you live, transportation from the farm to the market takes quite a long time and often does the most damage to produce.

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Tiny Bubbles in My Drinks

Lee Welles — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 15:43:12 +0000

My hubby has long had a taste for sparkling waters. Considering that the average 12 oz soda has 150 calories, 10-15 grams of sugar/high fructose corn syrup and drinking one can a day can lead to a 15-pound yearly weight gain (and diet soda isn’t much better) …I’m glad he likes the clear, slightly lemony stuff.

However, I always feel a pang of ’green guilt,’ as I dutifully return the plastic bottles for recycling. I had to consider that the plastic was made from petroleum, the bottles had to be shipped and it was all for an unneccessary food item. I found a brand of bubbly in glass containers, but the travel costs of our simple treat still nagged me.

My sister solved my dilemma with the best Christmas present ever! I am loving our new Soda Club Fountain Jet! Our starter kit came with soda flavors to add, but we’ve been happy with our bubbles and a squeeze of lemon or lime.

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What About Your Corn Footprint?

Philip Proefrock — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 14:37:54 +0000

Image Credit: USDA/Wikimedia CommonsAmericans eat a lot of corn. Sure there's cooked corn and corn chips and corn flakes and cornbread and the myriad other varieties found in the average American market. And, with the arrival of summer, there is now corn-on-the-cob (though here in the upper midwest: the sweet corn at the local supermarket right now is trucked in from Florida, not locally grown).

But in addition to its recognizable forms, where the corn is recognizable as corn, there are untold numbers of additional places where we don't recognize it, but where corn forms the substance of our diet. And most of that has been highly processed.

I've been reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan recently, and it has been a very enlightening read. One of the most shocking things to discover was just how much corn is suffused throughout the typical American diet.

Pollan enlisted a scientist at Berkeley to do a breakdown of the percentage of corn in a range of McDonald's foods. They found that more than half of the content of most of the items they studied (French fries were the only exception) was corn-based: "Soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and French fries (23 percent). What in the eyes of the omnivore looks like a meal of impressive variety turns out, when viewed through the eyes of the mass spectrometer, to be a meal of a far more specialized kind of eater." These numbers seem unreasonable, until you consider that the beef and the chicken were fed a diet consisting mostly of corn, that sweeteners (particularly high fructose corn syrup), oils, and other food additives are manufactured from corn by-products.

Turning around the American diet to reduce the amount of corn we consume is not going to be an easy task. And it's not even necessarily a problem with the amount of corn that we eat as it is a problem with the way that we eat so much of the corn that we eat. Eating isn't even the only way we consume corn now. We're also putting it into our gas tanks as ethanol. In many ways, corn is emblematic of the larger issue of the industrialized, over-processed way so much of our consumption has been herded. More than anything, we need to become more enlightened about the wider effects of our consumption choices.

Corn is an energy-intensive crop to grow. It takes hundreds of pounds per acre of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to produce the glut of corn that becomes feedstock for so much of the industrialized American diet. The politics and complexities of government farm subsidies are nearly overwhelming, and certainly far beyond the scope of what I can write about here, but they are certainly a sizable part of the equation as well.

Along with trying to eat more local food and more whole food (meaning unprocessed or less-processed food, not the grocery chain), reducing the amount of corn in your diet is something to consider. From an overall green perspective, reducing your corn footprint could be one of the best things you can do. I haven't seen any hard numbers for it yet, but the advantages could be numerous. Reducing the amount of corn in your diet will help to reduce both carbon emissions and chemical pollution with farm runoff. And many of the corn by-products in food are sources of empty calories, so reducing the corn in your diet can also be a healthier step.

Cutting high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) out of your diet is going to be particularly difficult, because that sweetener has made its way into all manner of products. I started looking for bread that was not made with HFCS, and found it was a lot harder to find than I imagined. Almost all bread has HFCS high up on the ingredients list. One local store brand had a decent loaf that did not contain HFCS, but it was only sporadically available. More recently, a couple of the stores we shop at have had decent, store-label organic bread that is HFCS-free (organic HFCS is a virtual oxymoron, so organic choices are a good way to limit HFCS). But it's still in more of the foods I eat than I would like.

The Lighter Side of Green: Citizen Skein

Wendy Laird — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 00:41:28 +0000

A lot has been written recently about eating "locally." It’s an interesting concept; eating food that doesn’t have to travel too far, thereby saving energy. But once again, the Man has set himself up to feel good about something that actually harms our fragile globorb. These “locavores” eat foods from within 100 miles of where they live, as if a truck driving 100 miles doesn’t spew tons of carbon into our atmosphere.

I’m a skeinavore. I only eat foods from within 100 yards.

Now, let's make one thing clear: I would rather not eat at all. Every time I do, I feel immense guilt about the methane I produce. Did you know that the average person produces 2 liters of gas a day? The shame of it keeps me up at night.

But even a carbon-negative person like me has to take in calories. If I didn't, I wouldn't be here to point out and counteract all the wasteful, thoughtless things you people do.

Since I am forced to ingest biomatter, I’ve developed some easy-to-follow eating guidelines with our habitorb in mind. A Carbon-Negative Diet, if you will. So for those eager to learn the secret to staying thin and green, here, in a nutshell, is my diet:

Things that come from my immediate vicinity.
Things that died a natural death after a long, happy life.
Things that I find.
Things that don't produce methane. The following list of gas-generators is completely forbidden:

Asparagus
Broccoli
Brussels sprouts
Cabbage
Cauliflower
Corn
Cucumbers
Kohlrabi
Leeks
Onions
Peas
Peppers
Radishes
Sauerkraut
Turnips
Carbonated drinks
Beer
Red wine
Sugar substitutes
Apples
Beans
Dairy products
Eggs
Wheat
Melons
Apricots
Prunes
Olestra

This leaves, basically, hemp, soy, some ancient grains, and Chicken McNuggets®, but only if they fall to the ground in front of me. If every American followed my simple plan, obesity would be a thing of the past. We could curtail our methane production, shut down the cattle industry (indeed, all farming as we know it), and save billions in fuel and plus-size clothing. But of course you won’t. You’ll keep driving your Prius to Whole Foods and enjoying your tasty groceries. Fine; more spelt for me.