We all know that packaging is a part of our food world that is damaging to the earth – just look at the plastic bags, water bottles, pizza boxes, aluminum cans, and more, that litter our parks, fill our landfills, clog our streams, and can ultimately harm ocean animals, as you can see in the accompanying photograph of trash taken from a turtle’s stomach.

Ok, where’s the good news? Nature, as usual, has anticipated our need. There ARE foods with their own packaging – bananas, eggs, grapes, walnuts, and more.  Some ingenious people have been working on making food wrapping that is biodegradable – I first mentioned this in my 2002 book Eating to Save the Earth. Progress is being made, and in fact, the new wrinkle is to make the wrapping not just biodegradable, but edible.

Writer Beth Buczynksi says it well in her title, “Is Edible Food Packaging The Answer To Plastic Waste?” She highlights the work of Harvard professor David Edwards, who has invented a machine that creates WikiCells, which are membranes made of natural food elements. I am not making this up. Tomato coverings for gazpacho soup and orange membrane to contain orange juice and (be still, my heart) chocolate membrane to contain hot chocolate.

At the moment, you’d have to buy a machine to create these, but we might see these in stores in a year or so. Borrowing a phrase from my recent food/environment book The Green Foodprint, I’d call this Nude Food!

However, let’s not forget that this would be a product of biotechnology, and the molecules would be manipulated with industrial methods. A journal article abstract on the topic in the Annual Review of Food Science and Technology contains phrases like “biopolymer-based food packaging materials” and ”dry thermoplastic process” and “nanocomposite concepts.”   What do you think?

Long before so many American jobs were outsourced, our food supply network was spread across the globe. Over a hundred years ago, the great short story writer O.Henry located many of his tales in Central America on fruit plantations or the ships that brought the fruit to the U.S. It was not a pretty picture then, and it’s worse now.

Most of the shrimp consumed in the U.S. now comes from southeast Asia, where factory fish farms are set up along the coast, destroying mangrove forests in the process. Mangroves are those weird-looking trees with roots above the water line, but to people who used to live there, they were home. And to children at the Avocado Elementary School, they were a wonderful home to wildlife (see their wonderful illustration).

But fish farms are just as destructive as factory farms on land. Result: the carbon footprint of these shrimp is higher than that of beef from ranches built on land that was once Amazon rainforest. Tom Philpott, a great food writer for Mother Jones, quoted this bleak conclusion from the book Bottomfeeder by Taras Grescoe: “The simple fact is, if you’re eating cheap shrimp today, it almost certainly comes from a turbid, pesticide- and antibiotic-filled, virus-laden pond in the tropical climes of one of the world’s poorest nations.”

So to get your food choices out of all this destruction, please take shrimp off your menu, if you haven’t already. Delicious options that are easy on the earth and kind to your conscience can be found at Bay Area restaurants such as Café Gratitude in San Francisco, Lydia’s Kitchen Cafe in Fairfax, and International Vegetarian House Restaurant in San Jose.

We know about organic, and we know about local, and we know that many farmers are working to make their enterprises safe for people and the land. I’m happy to report that there is also a movement to make it possible for farming to co-exist with wildlife. This is important if you love nature, because protecting biodiversity is good for everyone’s future.

Biodiversity exists when a place has a variety (diversity) of plants and animals, living together in a complex ecosystem. A healthy, diverse ecosystem might consist of a stream with reeds and grasses growing on the bank, fish that live in the stream, trees nearby that host birds, and so on. This collection of different living things is the opposite of a gigantic field of one variety of corn.

An organization called the Wild Farm Alliance has been formed “to promote agriculture that helps to protect and restore wild Nature.” (site) True to this vision, Wild Farm Alliance offers tools, brochures, books, guidelines – good things a farmer can use to make his or her land hospitable to a variety of creatures.

Did you know that if farmers dedicate a strip of land just three feet wide to growing plain old grass, instead of a revenue-producing crop, this strip can remove most E. coli organisms from water overflowing? Or that hedgerows (strips of trees or bushes between fields) can reduce drifting dust and pesticides from neighboring areas?

You can download one of the brochures here:
http://www.wildfarmalliance.org/resources/fdsfty_brochure.htm

PS. They’re hiring! As of today, January 31, the website announces a search for a program assistant in Watsonville.