Adopting the green lifestyle means building green eating habits, too. But what exactly is green eating, and can you do it in a fast-food world?
Green eating involves knowing more about where your food comes from and how it’s produced. It means changing your food-buying habits to support the most sustainable and environmentally friendly means of food production. In short, it takes work. But the payoff is worth it.
You don’t have to look any further than the daily news to know there’s something wrong with the way many of us eat today. There’s the obesity epidemic, E. coli outbreaks, trans-fat-related health problems, junk-food marketing to children, and so on. So how can we change our lifestyles to eat better … and greener?
First, understand that green alone does not always mean healthful. This year’s multi-state outbreak of E. coli traced back to spinach grown in California underscores that. But the problem isn’t the spinach; it’s how most spinach is grown, predominantly in a few parts of the country, then processed in a small number of facilities that ship to, well, practically everywhere. When even a small field becomes bacteria-infected in that kind of food production arrangement, the potential for illness to spread across the country is magnified.
The solution isn’t to stop eating spinach. The answer lies with choosing more eco-friendly, closer-to-home sources of spinach and other vegetables. And if spinach isn’t in season? Opt for more seasonal produce instead. That way, you can continue to support local agriculture and ensure you’re buying food that’s probably fresher than anything you’ll find in the nearby supermarket.
Eating green also means paying attention to the energy used to produce food. The pesticides, herbicides, insecticides and fertilizers that help generate the huge harvests seen in industrial-style farming carry with them a cost, and you can see the price on the signs looming over every gas station in town. Modern, large-scale farming is fossil-fuel-intensive: oil is used for everything from producing fertilizers and pesticides to packaging your food and trucking it for hundreds of thousands of miles to market.
Again, choosing local food sources helps reduce that energy cost. Opting for locally grown organics is even better, because organic farming doesn’t use most of the artificial chemicals found in industry farms. Another plus: when you’re buying organic foods, you ensure you’re not buying produce grown from genetically modified seeds, or products made with genetically modified crops. A growing number of the “standard” foods we buy are made with such genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and there’s no label required to identify them as such. So if you’re looking to eat truly natural foods, organic is good, organic and local better yet.
