The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [64]
Around this time, I was becoming more wary of not only how much waste I was creating, but how environmentally friendly the actual foods I purchased were, too. I’d read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and was avidly devouring magazine articles and websites having to do with the sustainable food movement, which was then not yet really a movement. I felt guilty as I walked home from the butcher. I would have bought some chicken from the farmers’ market if it had been open that day, at a stand that sold cage-free and humanely raised animals. I had read up on horrifying facts about chicken coops where the animals spent their short lives squashed together, and was sympathetic to these and other conventional meat animals’ poor health and living conditions. I’d also read FastFoodNation, and the E. coli in hamburger meat that had created a scare, described in that book, was now turning up in vegetables like spinach. As time went by, I would find out about the problems of runoff from those great big feedlots, how it was contaminating water supplies, and how monoculture (the practice of planting only one plant variety), favored by industrial agriculture, threatened crops and biodiversity. It seemed like most of our food supply was being controlled by very careless corporations. In middle school, I’d overhear students crack jokes about the gray hamburger patties in the cafeteria. As long as I was in a place to make a decision about what to purchase and eat and what not to, I’d stick with the more responsibly raised meats, I’d decided—which happened to be tastier and less “gray” than the others.
All this new food awareness was gradually weighing in on my food-buying choices. Since I was buying raw ingredients to cook with, I was faced with decisions like whether to buy organic, humanely raised, or pesticide free all the time. This was another unexpected result of my not-eating-out mission: I was now forced to think about where that meat or that vegetable came from and how it was grown. Eating in restaurants, you don’t often have that choice as a consumer. More and more, restaurants tout the names of the farms or purveyors where their ingredients came from. But this trend is mostly among more upscale eateries, often expensive ones, too. And that was something I really couldn’t afford all the time. I figured that with the money that I was saving by not eating out, I could afford to be choosy and to buy based on principle. Hence, eating in, and cook ing everything, was the catalyst for my interest in healthy, sustainable, seasonal, local, and generally more earth-friendly food.
I added another feature to my blog to showcase this in every recipe I posted. I called it the “Green Factor,” and it rated the environmental friendliness of all the ingredients in the dish, combined. After every Green Factor rating, I tried my best to explain why it was rated so, digging into the implications of all the foods, how and where they came from. Ultimately, I stopped eating meat as frequently, since the pastured meats I now wanted to strictly support were more expensive, and I didn’t feel that I was sacrificing my health by having meat only once or twice a week. On the contrary, you could argue that less meat in our diet keeps humans and the earth healthier. That chicken breast that I got from the butcher for my weigh-in experiment had been the first piece of meat I’d bought in a week.
Once home, I chopped up some garlic and a few slices of ginger from a knob that was drying in my cupboard. I couldn’t remember exactly how these had been packaged when I’d gotten them. I no longer had the original bags, but I guessed that I had bought them originally in plastic ones. Still, I was using so little ginger and garlic for one individual-sized portion of chicken and broccoli that these bags would be almost negligent in my waste weigh-in.
Calculations got trickier when it came to the sauces I put in the dish.