Green Options

Eco-conscious and green consumers around the globe are increasingly aware of the carbon footprint of their food choices, but what about the water footprint?

As water becomes an increasingly scarce global resource, the focus turns toward analyzing how much water it takes to grow particular foods.  Increasing awareness of the amount of water various foods require can help consumers make educated choices for the most environmentally conscious products.

Not surprisingly many of the same attributes that make for smart environmentally friendly choices also make sense from a water consumption perspective.  Not eating meat, choosing locally grown organic foods, and growing as much produce as possible in your own backyard are also the best choices for using the least amount of water.

Consumers in Europe are likely to increasingly see fruit and vegetables with less than perfect appearance (the so called “wonky” produce) on their supermarket shelves from July 2009 as the EU tries to reduce its bureaucracy

Attractive and wholesome fruit and vegetables like these feed the world but have, over the last few decades, lost their place in the “First World’s“ supermarkets to perfectly shaped and coloured specimens. Through the supermarket pushing “quality” and bureaucrats busying themselves, visual standards gained a status that has had negative impacts for the consumer, the farmer and the environment.

The European Union is well known for the banana standard which, after a year of study, stated that a banana should be “5.5 inches long and 1.1 inches wide, and could not be abnormally bent”. This allowed the EU to advantage bananas from the Caribbean (mainly its former colonies) that met the standard to the disadvantage of Latin American producers who were backed by USA based multinationals. Rulings by the World Trade Organisation and the threats of the US lead to a truce with the tariffs being removed progressively.

But now regulations on 26 fruits and vegetables have been repealed while member states can allow the sale of 10 other products which do not meet the standards, so long as appropriate labeling is used.

Most of us know something about carbon footprints. In fact, some of us may have already taken measures to reduce the hypothetical size of our footprints–from walking or riding a bicycle instead of driving, to purchasing carbon credits to reduce the impact of our carbon emissions. But many of us may have never thought about our water footprint. The new website H20 Conserve allows users to calculate [...]