Food Choices for Healthy People and a Healthy Planet

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Another brave move by New York Mayor – food composting

In Excerpt from Book, In the News,
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  • Posted on June 16, 2013
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Today, the New York Times reported that outgoing mayor Michael Bloomberg will follow up on his February comment deploring food waste by establishing a program to allow (and some day require) households to recycle it through city-collected bins.

This is good news to everyone who knows that food waste is one of our most unnecessary losses. San Francisco, of course, required food recycling starting in 2009. The East Bay city of Lafayette has been collecting food waste for years.

As I wrote in The Green Foodprint, “There is no waste in nature. Every plant, animal, rock, and drop of water is broken down and reused. Fallen trees, leaves, the shells left by a nut-eating squirrel, and the fur or feathers left by a predator are recycled in the ecosystem, decaying and becoming soil in which new plants and animals can live and grow.” Yet 30% of food produced, worth billions of dollars, is wasted every year.

The mayor’s administration, we are told, is about to hire a composting plant to receive and process 100,000 tons of food scraps a year. According to reporter Mireya Navarro, that’s still only one tenth of the waste generated by city’s residents, but that this measure could save $100 million a year. Not to mention the topsoil or energy that can be generated by skillfully recycling it.

Some day we’ll look back and be amazed at what people used to throw away.

Related links:
Bloomberg Plan Aims to Require Food Composting
Bloomberg Wants Restaurants to Compost – The New York Times

 


Surprising place for progress in food sustainability

In Excerpt from Book, Good News, In the News,
  • Posted on March 12, 2013
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I’ve long supported an inclusive and incremental approach to environmental change, which I would summarize this way: Applaud positive steps made by individuals and businesses, while being wary of greenwash and false advertising. Look to like-minded people for support and ideas, but make the effort to seek, evaluate, and support progress made by people and companies you otherwise suspect. Imagine a world that is clean, safe, and sustainable, but accept that it will take decades to undo the destruction that the industrial revolution began three centuries ago. Be willing to look beyond stereotypes, seek common ground, and praise small steps. Don’t expect perfection, but strive for improvement. Relinquish the temptation to cast ourselves as heroes and everyone else as villains or sloths. Keep hoping.

This philosophy comes into sharp focus when one contemplates a recent E Magazine article which summarized environmental progress being made by the poster child of corporate evil, the food chain McDonalds.

Wait! Keep reading! The corporate fast-food giant has initiatives on energy, packaging, waste reduction, recycling, and more. You can investigate more here.

And get this: last year McDonald’s partnered with well-known genuine environmental groups to identify “Planet Champions” within the corporation’s worldwide reach. “The selection committee voted for projects and included representatives from McDonald’s as well as Business for Social Responsibility, Ceres, Conservation International, and World Wildlife Fund.” The highlighted parties did things in their local region like improving waste management, calculating ways to reduce carbon use, building the first LEED gold building in the country, and more.

As I wrote in The Green Foodprint, “There is hope for our food system. Determined groups and individuals have stopped some of industry’s worst tactics and even turned some businesses around. It’s not good to have a giant against you, but if you can get the giant on your side, you’re in luck.”


Food, glorious food….

In Excerpt from Book, Take Action,
  • Posted on November 26, 2012
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Food is nature’s gift– well, nature and all the people who grew it and brought it to us. But we seem to be ungrateful, wasting about 40% of what we produce. Dana Gunders, writing for the Natural Resources Defense Council, reminds us that all this food represents the use of water, land, energy, and lots of chemicals that aren’t all good for us. As I wrote in The Green Foodprint:

There is no waste in nature. Every plant, animal, rock, and drop of water is broken down and reused. Fallen trees, leaves, the shells left by a nut-eating squirrel, and the fur or feathers left by a predator are recycled in the ecosystem, decaying and becoming soil in which new plants and animals can live and grow.

We humans have disturbed this cycle, taking unwanted material to landfills, where it is junked with old batteries, turpentine, plastic containers, and other unnatural trash to be sealed off for decades. Waste occurs at the farm, the factory, the store, and the kitchen. Thirty percent of food, worth $48 billion, is thrown away every year just by households. Wasting food also means wasting water. One hamburger, for instance, takes over 600 gallons of water to produce. Food sent to the landfill also generates methane, a greenhouse gas much more damaging than carbon dioxide.

Let’s learn from nature and eliminate the whole concept of waste. Some companies have already spotted the opportunity. In New Jersey, a new plant (creating local jobs) will put food waste into huge digester tanks with oxygen, microbes, and heat, to turn it into compost and fertilizer. Now that’s recycling to the nth degree!

What you can do:

✓ Serve yourself only as much as you’re likely to eat.

✓ Save and use leftovers.

✓ Learn new recipes for using them

✓ Compost the rest.


“Prescription produce”– healthy food for healthy people

In Excerpt from Book, Food to Try,
  • Posted on August 3, 2012
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You already know that what you eat has a huge impact on your health. Fresh fruits and vegetables are so important that in some places, doctors are helping their less affluent patients pay for them.  As I wrote in The Green Foodprint, some Massachusetts doctors are taking active steps to help low-income children adopt a healthier diet. They’re advising their patients to buy “prescription produce” at local farmers’ markets–and even giving them coupons to help them pay for it.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, as Kristina Chew reported last week, the nonprofit Wholesome Wave is bringing such programs to other states, benefiting eaters and small farmers in Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and California. And recently Wholesome Wave got a half-million dollar grant to help create jobs in rural communities and regional “food hubs.”  This is very exciting to all those working to re-create our food system into one that is healthy for people and supportive to farmers. And if you need further inspiration, let me suggest a few books that make the case for food as a body’s best friend.

Anticancer, A New Way of Life, by David Servan-Schreiber. This well-deserved best-seller is a gripping personal account of a doctor’s cancer that awakened him to the body’s natural needs. While acknowledging the value of Western medicine to intervene in a crisis, he sets forth the scientific discoveries about breathing, meditation, supportive relationships, and diet that serve to strengthen our own healing powers.

Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease by Dean Ornish. Against immense skepticism from the medical establishment, Ornish doggedly proved that heart disease can be reversed with a program of meat-free diet, exercise, meditation, and imagery. This book explains the medical reasons why the program works, and how the reader can share the many benefits of adopting a heart-healthy lifestyle.

Becoming Vegan: The Complete Guide to Adopting a Plant-Based Diet by Brenda Davis,  and Vesanto Melina. The authors, registered dietitians, explore the benefits of a vegan diet (without meat, eggs or dairy products) — the impact of their nutritional choices on health, the environment, animal rights, and human hunger. Beyond making the case for veganism, this book shows you how to adopt it and how a vegan diet can protect against cancer, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses.


“Prescription produce”– healthy food for healthy people

In Excerpt from Book, Food to Try,
  • Posted on August 3, 2012
  • Author: ,
  • Comments: Comments Off on “Prescription produce”– healthy food for healthy people


You already know that what you eat has a huge impact on your health. Fresh fruits and vegetables are so important that in some places, doctors are helping their less affluent patients pay for them.  As I wrote in The Green Foodprint, some Massachusetts doctors are taking active steps to help low-income children adopt a healthier diet. They’re advising their patients to buy “prescription produce” at local farmers’ markets–and even giving them coupons to help them pay for it.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, as Kristina Chew reported last week, the nonprofit Wholesome Wave is bringing such programs to other states, benefiting eaters and small farmers in Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and California. And recently Wholesome Wave got a half-million dollar grant to help create jobs in rural communities and regional “food hubs.”  This is very exciting to all those working to re-create our food system into one that is healthy for people and supportive to farmers. And if you need further inspiration, let me suggest a few books that make the case for food as a body’s best friend.

Anticancer, A New Way of Life, by David Servan-Schreiber. This well-deserved best-seller is a gripping personal account of a doctor’s cancer that awakened him to the body’s natural needs. While acknowledging the value of Western medicine to intervene in a crisis, he sets forth the scientific discoveries about breathing, meditation, supportive relationships, and diet that serve to strengthen our own healing powers.

Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease by Dean Ornish. Against immense skepticism from the medical establishment, Ornish doggedly proved that heart disease can be reversed with a program of meat-free diet, exercise, meditation, and imagery. This book explains the medical reasons why the program works, and how the reader can share the many benefits of adopting a heart-healthy lifestyle.

Becoming Vegan: The Complete Guide to Adopting a Plant-Based Diet by Brenda Davis,  and Vesanto Melina. The authors, registered dietitians, explore the benefits of a vegan diet (without meat, eggs or dairy products) — the impact of their nutritional choices on health, the environment, animal rights, and human hunger. Beyond making the case for veganism, this book shows you how to adopt it and how a vegan diet can protect against cancer, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses.


Food packaging

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  • Posted on June 25, 2012
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A few months ago I wrote about edible food packaging, which, if it becomes feasible, would be one interesting way to tackle the astounding waste of natural resources (trees, petroleum, aluminum, energy) caused by food packaging. According to  As You Sow, an organization devoted to leading corporations toward sustainability, “At least 43 million tons of plastic, glass, metal, and paper packaging—much of it with market value—is landfilled or burned in the U.S. each year. Packaging waste is also the biggest component of ocean litter that harms marine life and pollutes our oceans.”

 

 

 

 

Before I get to today’s news, here are some things you can do right now about packaging waste, that I wrote about here:

✓ Buy products with the least packaging: Fresh, local, in season. Be willing to buy produce that is perfectly good, though it might not look perfect.

✓ Buy products in bulk or large containers, not tiny serving sizes.

✓ Use concentrates (juices, cleansers), which require less packaging.

✓ When buying a few small items, ask the clerk not to put them in a bag.

✓ Reuse and recycle the packaging you can’t avoid.

✓ Bring your own cloth bags. Many grocery and drug chains sell them, as do online retailers. Some stores give you a small rebate for bringing your own bags.

✓ Eat your package. Buy ice cream in cones, not plastic cups.

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) is a new movement, complete with its own acronym, challenging manufacturers to create more earth-friendly products and to take responsibility for their remains after consumers (that’s you and me!) have used them. So far this mostly pertains to large appliances. In the food world, of course, recycling is the currently most usable technique.

And, of course, if you go for apples and bananas, you can always eat your packaging!


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