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The paper of Up Yours! :D
"Save the world by only consuming Oxygen"
It's an old joke, but one that still holds relevance as people try and figure ways not to contribute to the epidemic of over consumption that is over taxing the world's resources. When every other piece of food in the supermarket comes from out of country or is over processed or wrapped in more packaging then its actual weight, it can feel like the only way to have your diet not adding to the heavy impact on the environment would be to simply not eat at all. But thankfully, there are ways of lessening the impact your food-consuming habits have on the Earth with out going on an extreme starvation diet or lowering your quality of life, as this study of my own personal habits and changes of those habits will show.
One of the largest problems to tackle with reducing my own personal food related impact was dietary issues. It's common knowledge that the best way to have less environmental impact is to go vegetarian or vegan, as meat production uses a lot of resources. However, a combination of a food sensitivity to soy protein and chronic anemia made this option unavailable to me and meant that instead of just focusing on changing to a different diet, a lot of smaller changes would have to be made to cause a similar reduction.
One of the first things looked to diet shift was what foods could be reduced or removed from my current diet. Normally, this step would involve removing the glut of preprocessed, chemical laden, over packaged, single serve food items that often fill the traditional American household. However, very few of these items existed in my own household, and those that did, were consumed at such a slow rate that they hadn't been purchased in over a year, if not longer.
The only category where these items existed were snacks and deserts. Of these, many had more environmentally friendly replacements that were easily switched to. Mirowave popcorn bags were easily replaced with a jug of popcorn kernels to be heated on the stove-top. The kernels have less packaging, coming in a recyclable plastic jug instead of a box containing many individually plastic wrapped paper bag. Mainstream cookies were replaced with those that were made from organic ingredients, as were pretzels. An organic ice cream was tested, but the quality was not at all worth the price paid, so it was decided to simply eat less of the all natural ice cream that was normally gotten.
One important shift was the decision to only buy organic chocolate. Chocolate comes from the cacao tree, which traditionally is grown in the shade of a thinned area of the rainforest. However, increased demand for it started the practice of full-sun cocao farming, where the trees of the rainforest are cut down and cleared. While this method does produce a higher yield of crops, it also makes the plant more prone to disease, insects and sun-related damage, which means heavy amounts of pesticides and fertilizers must be applied to the fields in order to keep the higher yields. [GG-1]
However, like any organic food, organic chocolate has a higher price tag then the standard fifty cent candybar. However, the low price tag on that cheep candy bar may be made possible by child, slave, or simply underpaid labour. [E, p33] This makes it doubly important to get organic and fair trade chocolate, and often, the taste and quality that you get from organic chocolate is well worth the extra money. Quite often, a small amount of the higher quality chocolate is enough to satisfy a craving, leading to less consumption, which also helps balance out the higher cost.
After sorting through the processed foods, "raw" foods were looked at. Due to food sensitivities, beef was already an infrequent purchase. Beef chopmeat had been replaced with turkey chopmeat and chicken was the staple in most of the meat based meals in the household, and a shift to fish was just not appealing in any way. So the changes that were put into action were all centered around two basic factors: packaging and processing.
Quite often, most meats are packaged on styoform shells, made from one of the worst plastics in terms of sustainablility. This plastic is bulky and not often recycled, meaning its bulk will go directly to a landfill. Often the meats in these packages are the most processed as well, meaning the best way to reduce both packaging and processing was to do both at the same time, getting things like whole chickens and turkey breasts that are packaged in a shell of thick plastic wrap, which folds up much more compactly then styofoam when put in the garbage.
Since a dairy cow can produce many more pounds of milk then a meat cow can produce of beef in its lifetime, another way to reduce your personal impact is to eat more dairy protein then meat, as by not destroying the source of the product gives you more benefits in the long run. Similarly, eating more eggs instead of chickens can also help. Vermont has many local facilities that produce dairy products, which lessens the transportation impact as well. It is also possible to get eggs direct from local chicken owners, often for cheaper then can be gotten at the grocery store. Many of these also reuse egg cartons, almost eliminating the packaging impact as well as the impact of the store and most of the shipping.
Ideally, getting organic milk products would be best, but in many instances, the organic milk is not only more expensive, it has been trucked in from far distances, giving it a much higher transportation impact.
And since transportation is a major factor in the impact of foods, one of the easiest and largest ways to lessen environmental impact is to get more foods directly from those who grow them. Community supported agriculture, also known as farm share, is a program in which an individual or a family buys shares of, or pledge support to a farm in return for a share of the harvest. This system eliminates many steps that add impact and cost to foods purchased at the grocery store, enabling people to get local, often organic foods at logical prices, while directly supporting the farm that it comes from. This system also puts people more in touch with the source of their foods, enabling them to be more aware of the effort and energy that goes into what they eat.
For foods that cannot be purchased though a CSA, there are other methods of getting organic or local foods. Farmer's markets are one such resource. At a farmer's market, items are gotten direct from the producer, whether it be raw foods such as vegetables or meat, or processed foods such as pre-made soups, seasonings or cheeses. By getting these foods directly, rather then through a store, you can eliminate the section of environmental impact of the store itself. Also, by growing his or her own foods, a person can produce an small organic crop with a low cost to him or her and the environment.
Often over looked in the topic of how to eat in an environmentally friendly way is what is around the food, how it's cooked, stored and how much is wasted. Even if you buy the most local organically grown food there is, if you waste a lot of resources and energy preparing it, it'll still have a heavy impact.
Almost everyone who watches TV has seen the commercials encouraging you to use tin foil in ways that make it so you don't have to wash dishes. It's the standard American way of thinking: throw something out after using it once in the name of convenance. Tin foil, while useful in many areas of cooking, it something that should be used sparingly, as it's made from a limited resource that has to be mined and processed. It's far cheaper, both in terms of money and impact, to simply wash whatever you're cooking on.
How you cook can also be a big impact. Large oven are often high energy users, as the entire oven must be heated, including the air taking up the empty space. To cook something in an oven for 3 hours, it takes over 7.8 kilowatt-hours. However, to cook in a crock pot for 6 hours, it would only take one kilowatt-hour. [EV - 1] Slow cooking heats a small area for a more extended time, and some slow cookers have higher temperature settings for a speedier cook. For small amounts of food, a toaster oven can also be used in replacement of a conventional oven. Since it heats up a smaller area, it is more energy efficient and causes less of an environmental impact. Not using a conventional oven can help in summer to cut down on the extra heat entering the house, adding even more energy savings.
When dealing with food products, there is almost always waste associated, such as unused portions, packaging, shells, peels, fat, or skins. However, many of these wastes can be dealt with in ways that will reduce their environmental impacts.
Non meat and dairy food wastes can be dealt with by composting. Almost any non-meat or dairy food waste is home compostable, including all fruits and vegetables as well as grain based foods such as pasta or rice. Composting is a very simple process. Fence off a piece of land (a wire cover might be recommended if there is a concern about animals) and place the compostable waste inside, periodically placing a small amount of dirt over it. The material will biodegrade with time and sunlight. There are other methods for faster composting, as well as for indoor composting.
Steps can also be taken to choose items that have reusable or recyclable packaging, and packaging that is more easily recycled: for example, getting apple sauce in a glass jar, rather then a plastic jug. While the jar is heavier and had a slightly higher impact in shipping, glass recycling has a smaller impact then plastic recycling. Glass jars can also be more easily be reused for storage.
Plastics are polymers made from fossil fuels, a non renewable, non replenishable resource, that can break down and even sometimes melt when exposed to fatty foods and/or heat, making them not only environmentally unsafe, and unsafe for using for many types of food storage. While not practical for all food storage uses, one way to reduce the amount of plastics used in connection with foods and cooking is to store leftovers in glass jars.
Wide mouthed glass canning jars, as well as glass jars that previously held foods are ideal for storing liquid foods like sauce or soups, and similarly well suited for small foods like rice or pasta. They are washable, and fats do not cling to them like they do with plastics and a hotter temperature of water may be applied to keep them cleaner than plastics. Glass jars also last for longer then plastic containers, and retain a clearer appearance, but when it does come time to dispose of old jars, glass is easily recycled, much more so then plastics.
At the end of any advertisement saying how you can change your personal habits to gain wealth and power, loose weight or win the lottery there's always some clip show of people saying how much they've gained from the program, how much they've improved themselves, how much they've improved the world around them. It's all with that little 'Results not typical' and 'your results may vary' disclaimer, and many cases, the gains are all superficial anyway. After all, it does you no good to have dropped 50 pounds if it means you'll be dieing of malnutrition or a heart attack in 5 years anyway. But in this society where results are all that matter, we need to justify all our actions in saying how much benefit there is, how much we, personally, have changed for the better, and how that change positively benefits the world around us, or at least us personally.
Similarly, we're expected to have a nice little number or figure to tote around at the end of this paper to show off how much we've improved things. In this case, a nice number of how many pounds of pesticides this plan of action kept from being used would be ideal. However, buying organic does not stop pesticides from being used. It supports an industry that doesn't use them, which, in the long run, will slowly stop the use of chemical pesticides, but me eating a box of organic cereal doesn't stop the farm conglomerates from spraying their fields. It just means that they'll have more waste at the end of the day when a box of cereal that they produced got throw out instead of purchased. This will effect the cereal manufacturer before it effects the farmer. They'll no doubt come up with a new marketing strategy to boost the flagging sales, or try new things with their product, but not realize that its the non-organic nature of their ingredients that's causing the drop in sales. Similarly, buying local organic produce from a CSA won't stop farmers half way across the nation from spraying. Their mechanized produce is also bought and distributed by a conglomerate and sold to stores. If they even notice the small decrease in sales, it's highly unlikely that they'll know the cause.
To put it simply: You cannot measure any decrease in footprint because you yourself do not partake in the mass food culture around you. Even if your personal impact is reduced, your individual actions will not cause conglomerate companies to lower their production or change their habits. However, taking these steps will empower the natural and local foods industry, which in turn will have the power to cause the conglomerates to change.
Also, by supporting the natural food industry, you enable it to gain more market share and increase production. As this happens, the prices on organic and natural foods will lower and they will be in more and more stores, leading to more of the general public adding them to their diet. In the long run, if you remove the influence of government subsidies, it costs more to produce non-organic foods, but because the mechanized and chemical production is the norm, it is able to be sold for lower prices due to mass production, steamlined transport and mass sales. So as more and more money is given to the organic and natural foods industries, they will be able to gain the advantage that the "traditional" foods industry already has. Since people don't want to do anything that costs more or personally inconveniences them, they will often just buy whatever is cheep and easily available. Once the natural and organic foods industry has those advantages, the other, more nutritional based advantages that their products have will allow them to become the new normal for this society. Only then will the impact of the average person decrease.
The actions of a single person mean nothing if they do not affect the actions of the masses. All the actions I have taken as listed in the above are not how my actions will lower the load of the Earth. By talking about natural and organic foods to my friends and family, I have planted the seeds of change with in them as well. One friend is already doing what she can to shift the diet of her house hold to be less processed and more natural. Writing this paper only tells you what I've done. If it does not give you any ideas to change your actions, then it is a failure and a waste of time and resources.
Sources:
GG-1 : http://thegreenguide.com/reports/product.mhtml?id=6
E, p33 : "Chocolate's Dark Side" Kate Slomkowski. E The Environmental Magazine. November/December 2005, Volume XVI, Number 6.
EV - 1 : http://www.efficiencyvermont.com/Docs/applianceusage.pdf
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