More than forty years ago
Earth Day helped galvanize a popular pro-environment movement.
Yet today, the number and scope of environmental problems feels overwhelming. Aside from celebrating Earth Day, it doesn’t seem there is much we can do to make things better.
But perhaps we can begin by eating.
Of all our daily human activities, what we eat has perhaps the largest direct impact on the environment. Agriculture uses an estimated
70 percent of global freshwater to grow our food, and in the U.S., 22 percent of all our energy use is gobbled up by the food system.
So how to truly eat better and impact the environment?
Below are four important concepts to take with you next time you visit the grocery store.
1. Most of your food’s ‘carbon footprint’ does not come from being grown far away.
A common myth is that the food system uses so much fossil fuel because we ship food around the globe. And while it clearly takes energy to transport food, the truth is that our addiction to “convenience foods” uses far more.
From the making of fertilizer to the running your refrigerator, the food system uses an enormous amount of energy. But
according to the USDA, at no point do we use more of it than in our very own homes. While per capita energy use in the United States dropped almost 2 percent, our food-related per capita energy use increased more than 16 percent.
Between 1965 and 1995 the time Americans spent cooking at home dropped from
65 to 31 minutes a day, and today only slightly more than half the population reports cooking on a daily basis.
And while not turning on the stove sounds like a great way to cut back on the energy bill, it also means you are purchasing items which require far more processing and packaging than any of us would ever do at home.
Not only are most of those fast and packaged foods
higher in sugar and lower on nutrients. They are also wasting valuable energy resources.
From Life Cycle-Based Sustainability Indicators
for Assessment of the U.S. Food System. Center for Sustainable Systems, University of Michigan
2. ‘Conventional’ food uses far more energy than organic
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2007, U.S. agriculture used more than a billion pounds of pesticides (which works out to be only a fifth of the pesticides used world wide, however). The USDA also reports
farmers used 22 million tons of synthetic fertilizer in 2011.
That is a lot of chemicals to be spraying on the land. But the impact of chemical use does not end there.
Petroleum chemicals such as ethylene, propylene and methane are used to create many of the pesticides on the market today. And the amount of energy used
to create synthetic nitrogen fertilizer (more than 13 million tons) could heat 5.5 million homes for a year.
3. Like cosmetics, agri-chemicals are tested on animals
Many avoid cosmetics tested on animals – but what about the food you eat? How do companies test for the toxicity of chemicals used in agriculture?
Agricultural chemicals are also tested on animals. And not just lab rats and mice. Dogs and cats, rabbits and monkeys [click
here to read an example of the kinds of tests performed].
Enough said.
4. We waste good money on crappy food, which in turn wastes resources
The argument against eating organic foods or better raised meat (which, by the way, you should also eat much less of) is that it costs too much. But what do we spend our money on, and is it worth what we pay?
In 2013, Americans drank close to 39 gallons of soda per person (at a cost of about $150 per person), and in 2011, roughly
25 percent of the calories we consumed came from snack foods.
And yet we willingly pay
1000 times more for that can of soda then what it actually costs. It turns out, it is not organic food that is the rip off, but all that snack food we put in our shopping carts without second thought.
In other words, simply refraining from drinking soda could free up more than $10 a month to spend on better raised food. The
National Institutes of Health also estimates that bringing lunch to work one day a week could also save $270 and 48,000 calories a year.
This Earth Day, celebrate the earth by making more informed choices about what you eat. It might even have an impact on your own body and wallet too.
Source:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bethhoffman/2014/04/22/four-ways-to-eat-better-and-celebrate-the-earth/
© AFP/Getty Images
