Low Impact

There are diets which restrict your fats, and diets that restrict your carbohydrates. But how about a diet that restricts your carbon dioxide emissions?

As westerners we can cut back on a lot of our consumption, but food is a necessity! Nonetheless, we can still reduce the environmental impact that our diet has on the planet – we don’t have to reduce the amount we eat, but rather, pay more attention to what we eat.

There are a few key things to look out for, next time you’re doing the groceries. By selecting carefully, you can choose foods that result in less damage to the environment, and less carbon dioxide being emitted and contributing to climate change.

Food Miles, or “Eat Local”!

One of the biggest causes of carbon dioxide emissions related to our food is the cost of getting it to our supermarket. We’ve grown used to the fact that every sort of fruit and vegetable is available year round, regardless of season. This modern-day magic is accomplished by growing it somewhere where it is in season, and shipping it thousands of kilometres to your local store. Convenient, but hardly sustainable!

Buying local produce means the food you eat had less distance to be flown, shipped or trucked. This means less petrol burnt, and so less greenhouse gasses. But that’s not the only benefit. Crops that travel a long way often have to be harvested prior to ripening so they don’t go off during transit. They also may require extensive packaging so as not to get damaged.

As an additional benefit, in these times of skyrocketing petrol and gas prices, buying local may even save you a few dollars as the farmer doesn’t have to spend so much in transport!

The concept of reducing the distance your food is transported, or “food miles” is a popular one – there’s a lot of literature on the web about the “100 mile diet”, where you try to only eat food that grew within 100 miles of your front door. This is not only great for the environment, but also great for the local economy. It can also prove to be a very educational experience as you learn just what foods are produced in your district, and how far some of the ingredients in your shopping basket have come.

Packaging

Every year, food distributors seem to come up with new ways to brand and present the food that we eat. All too often, this seems to consist of packaging it up in “easy-use” portions consisting of plastic trays, cling wrap or foam protectors.

Unfortunately, all that packaging had to manufactured which both results in extra CO2 being emitted, but also adds to the cost of the item you’re purchasing. So on your next shopping trip, try to go for the least packaged item that you can.

Often packaging is unavoidable, or even desirable – taking rice home grain by grain would be an exercise in frustration! In these cases, try and buy your food in recyclable or bio-degradable packaging. Some stores, especially food co-ops may let you bring your own plastic containers. And when all else fails, buying in bulk not only reduces the proportion of packaging in your purchase, but can also save you good money.

Go Vegetarian. Or Vegetarian-ish

Australians in particular pride themselves on their love of a good steak. Gathering around a BBQ with a beer and grilling up a few tasty slice of tofu just doesn’t have the same feel about it!

But no matter how you look at it, producing meat has a bigger impact on the environment than fruit and vegetables. When we eat vegetables, we’re going straight to the source. But when we eat meat, we have to wait for the cow to convert vegetable matter into steak first, and thats not an efficient process. Figures vary, but it takes around 5 kilograms of grain to produce 1 kilogram of beef.

There’s other issues too, such as water use, antibiotics, land degradation and housing for the animals. Put together, reducing the amount of meat in your diet makes a lot of environmental sense (as well as health sense, in many cases).

Now becoming a full vegetarian might be a bridge too far for many of us. But we can all look at replacing, for instance, one or two meals a week with a vegetarian option. I’ve found that I prefer vegetarian lasagne to the meat version. And a home-made felafel, or chilli beans can be fantastic!

You never know – you may just get to enjoy exploring menu options past meat and three veg!

Buy Organic

Organic fruit and vegetables involves now artificial herbicides or pesticides. Most importantly, it involves no artificial fertilisers which are often manufactured from fossil fuels. Combined with the fact that organic farms often use less intensive farming and tilling methods, organic food will typically result in less carbon dioxide emissions than conventionally farmed foods. It will certainly result in a lot less chemicals finding their way onto your dinner plate!

You have to be careful though. The growing demand for organic food, and the limited number of farms that have secured organic certification means that the organic beans on the shelf might have travelled quite a distance – you could argue that any saving you made on the beans being organic is outweighed by the fossil fuels consumed to fly them thousands of kilometres to a shelf near you. Its just a case, as always, of being informed, and reading the label.

So there are a few options in converting to a low carbon diet. It doesn’t necessarily involve a massive change to your menu, and it doesn’t have to involve a massive change to your grocery bill – you might even save a few bucks! You could even find that saving the planet has never been so delicious!

(Image by Hans Hillewaert, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license)

Categories: DIY, environment, green, vegetarian