Solutions: Food

Food sustains every living thing in the world. Biologists have noted that all living things literally "eat their way through the world".

Our choices of food continually affect our environment:
Pressing for government policy in favor of healthy food can add political impetus to the efforts to clean up the polluting industries, such as coal burning power plants which emit mercury into the atmosphere and poison the fish. Cleaning up coal burning plants will also keep greenhouse gases out of the air.



What We Can Do

Eat Organic Food
We can buy organically grown food and refuse to purchase food grown with poisonous pesticides. Organic food preserves the fertility of the soil and eliminates the harmful impact that chemical fertilizers impose on pollinators such as bees, butterflies and small birds.

Buy Local Food
When we buy locally grown food, we dramatically reduce the amount of fuel and energy required to transport it from the farms to our homes. Locally grown food is also fresher and riper than food grown far away.

Eat a Mostly Vegetarian Diet
We can help heal and support the environment by choosing most of our foods low on the food chain. This means a diet consisting mostly of fruits, vegetables and mushrooms, legumes and grains, seeds & nuts. Foods from animals typically require over ten times the resources that foods from plants require. With careful design, milk products, eggs and honey can also be a sustainable portion of our nutrition. New methods are coming that will make these foods available without the destruction that was previously associated with them. Natural meat is a very inefficient and wasteful food.

Eat the new "Clean Meats" instead of slaughtered animals
There are new methods to make laboratory grown "Clean Meats" that will be environmentally sustainable and ethically superior. These meats are from actual meat cells, but no animals will be killed. Instead the flesh will be grown in 'bio-reactors', requiring a tiny fraction of the water and nutrient resources necessary for slaughtered meats.



"The solutions to hunger and climate change begin at the end of your fork."
(Small Planet)

Resources & Links


salad
veggie dishes
fruit
book: Diet for a Small Planet
lentils