Skinny Bitch_ Ultimate Everyday Cookbook - Kim Barnouin [8]
HOW FAR HAS YOUR FOOD TRAVELED?
Your food is earning more frequent flier miles than a bag of peanuts. And nobody is reaping the rewards. While more than eight hundred million tons of food a year are shipped around the hemisphere, food is traveling 25 percent farther than it did twenty years ago. In fact, it’s one of the biggest and fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Right behind factory farming.31 “We are living in the era of the 1,500-mile-meal, where each ingredient typically travels that distance to get to your plate,” said Kate Geagan, author of Go Green, Get Lean. “Unripe and unready, our food is picked to travel—eating oil and belching emissions. Eating locally is one way to reduce greenhouse gases.”
Think long and hard about this: Our food takes an average of seven days just to arrive at the grocery store. It may be another two to five days before you make the mistake of putting it in your cart. What does this say about the freshness of your food? You got it. Diddly-squat.
The best solution is to buy produce locally grown as often as you can. You don’t need to be hardcore. Every so often, enjoy foreign foods that aren’t grown in your area. I do. You’ll even find some ingredients in this cookbook that you cannot always get locally. But work local foods into your diet more often than not. Buying from your neighborhood farmers’ market ensures you’re not shipping your food in from halfway across the country and you’re putting fresh ingredients on the dinner table.
HOW MUCH FOOD ARE YOU BUYING AND WILL YOU EAT IT ALL?
I know, I sound like your freakin’ mother. But admit it, she had a point. Before I tell you you’re going to bed without any dessert, just ask yourself next time whether you’re biting off more than you can chew. If you are only feeding for one, why buy six pounds of carrots—unless you plan on turning into one.
The reason is simple. Nearly half of all the food harvested in the U.S goes to waste each year. Our food system produces about 3,774 calories per person every day, but we only consume about 2,100. The rest gets wasted, either by overeating or by tossing it in the dumpster.32
The best solution is to plan out your meals, including snacks, two weeks at a time, and prepare a grocery list that fits the bill. Account for foods that may go bad in those two weeks and possibly plan a bi-weekly trip to your local farmers’ market for some fresh produce. (Neighborhood carpool, anyone?)
This isn’t me trying to be a hard-ass. All this food that we are aimlessly wasting could help feed the more than eight hundred forty million people that are undernourished, or the twenty-five thousand people that die every day from hunger-related causes.33
Stick to the meal plan and you’ll scratch the planet on its back.
WHAT KINDS OF FOOD ARE YOU BUYING: PLANT-BASED OR ANIMAL-BASED?
I’ll say it again. It takes more than ten times the number of fossil fuels to produce a calorie of beef protein than a calorie of grain protein.34 It is more energy efficient to grow grain for humans to eat than it is to grow grain, turn it into feed, feed it to animals, and then slaughter the animal—all to end back up in your pretty little mouth. But here’s the funny thing: Apart from helping out the earth, eating green is actually good for you. The very foods with a high-carbon cost—red meat, pork, dairy products, and processed snacks—are also the foods chock-full of fat and unhealthy calories. When you go meatless, you win. Earth wins. Happy ending for everyone.
If you’re