Food Choices for Healthy People and a Healthy Planet

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Your water footprint

In In the News, Recommended Company, Take Action, Uncategorized, Useful tools,
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  • Posted on May 1, 2012
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Water is the third ingredient in our Top Three Absolute Requirements for Life, after air and ahead of food.  Lately I’ve been reading about a concept called “virtual water,” or your “water footprint.” This is the sum of all the water that goes into supporting your life. We naturally think of the water we drink, flush, and bathe in. But did you realize that we use water to grow our food, grow the cotton for our clothes, and generate energy? The list goes on.

The Nature Conservancy,   using information from the Water Footprint Network, has prepared an amazing infographic. The average American’s water footprint is… almost 33,000 glasses a day, or over 750,000 gallons a year. Most of this is NOT in what we drink.  The biggest user of water is livestock that we eat as meat. Cotton is next – check out the infographic here. 

National Geographic gives even more details. One pound of beef requires 1,800 gallons of water. Soybeans require only 216. Refined sugar requires 198. Check out their “embedded water” site here. 

Since water for drinking and sustaining other non-human life obviously trumps waste, we are all involved in this issue.

What you can do:

  • Use less water to do dishes, laundry, and bathing. This means full dishwasher, shorter laundry cycles, and shorter showers.
  • Use less energy of all kinds. We get some hydroenergy from damming rivers.
  • Fix leaky faucets.
  • Eat less meat, or none.
  • Compost food scraps instead of using water and electricity to send them down the disposal.
  • Find more information in The Green Foodprint.

There’s only a certain amount of fresh water on earth at any point in the water circulation cycle. Let’s use it wisely.


Raising chickens at home

In Animal Cruelty, Antibiotics, Food to Avoid, Food to Try,
  • Posted on April 20, 2012
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Raising chickens at your own home is a hot trend. It’s part of the urban farming movement highlighted in a recent New York Times article, and being adopted by people who are avoiding chemicals and people who are appalled at the horrors of factory farming. One Texan who keeps hens in her back yard was profiled. “Her roommates are all vegetarian or vegan, she said, but even the vegans eat the house-raised eggs because they know that the birds are healthy and well cared for. ‘They are like pets who happen to bring us breakfast,’ she said.”

In Lafayette (CA), John Kiefer, who has raised chickens for decades, is now teaching other people how to create a home-based chicken ranch, where you can keep hens in safe, humane housing you built yourself. In the last few years, John has held half a dozen workshops, and they’re always sold out.

It’s only fair to warn you, though, that in addition to organic eggs (of course you’d give them organic food to eat), chickens produce what let us delicately call “waste.” For those who have two or three birds in their back yard, not much of a problem. But those horrible factory farms I mentioned are polluting the nation’s waterways.

A report from the Pew Environment Group sums up the depressing picture:

  • “In less than 60 years, the number of broiler chickens raised yearly has skyrocketed 1,400 percent, from 580 million in the 1950s to nearly nine billion today.
  • Over the same period, the number of producers has plummeted by 98 percent, from 1.6 million to just over 27,000 and concentrated in just 15 states.
  • The size of individual operations has grown dramatically. Today, the typical broiler chicken comes from a facility that raises more than 600,000 birds a year.”

The Pew report recommends restrictions on factory farming – but I wish they would simply be outlawed. It’s cruel to the animals to stuff them by the thousands into huge warehouses – and dangerous, since operators, knowing that thousands of chickens would die of the conditions, dose them with antibiotics. Tom Philpott, a great Mother Jones blogger, recently summarized some studies showing how common salmonella is in factory farms and how resistant to antibiotics (because of the excess precautionary dosing). Yuck!

If you eat eggs and don’t have time to raise your own chickens (humanely and organically, natch), try to find someone near you who is. According to the New York Times article mentioned earlier, he or she has plenty of eggs to give away.


Good news from one food company

In Food to Try, Good News, Recommended Company,
  • Posted on April 16, 2012
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The companies that make and distribute the things we use every day can choose to retool their operations to be more earth-friendly – even in ways we may not see in the products themselves. Greenbiz.com, one of my favorite sources of news on industry and the environment, recently ran an article on Danone, the European dairy company that also sells its products in this country.

I must admit that dairy is not earth-friendly or even animal-friendly, since the milk comes from cows whose calves have been taken away. But I also believe that incremental change is better than no change, so with an acknowledgement of that moral dilemma, here goes:

Danone developed a way to compare the environmental impacts of its own products – even if they are almost identical, with only a few differing ingredients. “Now you can understand the embedded carbon in strawberry yogurt versus banana yogurt versus strawberry-banana yogurt,” said Scott Bolick, vice president of sustainability solutions at analytical services company SAP.

Danone is incentivizing its program by linking global managers’ bonuses to their success in reducing their carbon footprints – by doing things like devising more efficient delivery routs or changing packaging.

Almost every blog post I write contains a discovery. I’d never heard of SAP before, but it is a 40-year-old global software company that helps companies “operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably.” It must be doing something right — the Environmental Protection Agency just last month gave SAP a Climate Leadership Award.

Here’s an earth-friendly thing you can do — enjoy yogurt made from soy milk!


Safe food is packaged without BPA

In Food Politics, Food to Avoid,
  • Posted on April 14, 2012
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Sustainable means safe for humans, too. BPA (bisphenol-A) is a chemical that goes into making hard plastic. 6 million pounds a year are produced in the U.S.  and used to make CDs, DVDs, and eyeglasses. It wouldn’t be a direct consumer threat if those were its only uses. But BPA is also used to line food containers and to make water bottles. BPA is an endocrine disruptor, which interferes with  our hormones and also contributes to diabetes and heart disease.

Late last month the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) refused to ban BPA from food packaging, despite plenty of evidence that it’s harmful. The Natural Resources Defense Council, which supported the ban, was shocked. Dr. Sarah Janssen, one of NRDC’s senior scientists, stated, “BPA is a toxic chemical that has no place in our food supply. We believe FDA made the wrong call. The agency has failed to protect our health and safety — in the face of scientific studies that continue to raise disturbing questions about the long-term effects of BPA exposures, especially in fetuses, babies and young children.”  The Breast Cancer Fund blog also deplored FDA’s ruling.

Another branch of government, though, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is carefully offering advice about how to avoid BPA and revving up to support regulations, if they’re ever passed. HHS advice is available here. 

So once again consumers can take action when our regulators (FDA, in this case) won’t. Luckily, some companies are taking action voluntarily, removing BPA from their food packaging. Campbell’s Soup, for one.  And makers of beverage bottles are touting their BPA-free wares — just google it. So help the earth – and your own health—by purchasing food and drink that comes without this dangerous chemical – especially for babies and young children, whose bodies are still developing.


Chocolate with a clear conscience (the best flavor!)

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  • Posted on April 2, 2012
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The concept of sustainability, to some people, includes fair wages and treatment of people who work to produce our food, whether they are in this country or not. Sad to say, chocolate is among the foods produced by exploiting workers – even enslaving them. If this isn’t horrendous enough, some of those enslaved are children, especially in the West African nations of Ivory Coast and Ghana. This issue has been getting a lot of media coverage lately. Over ten years ago, American legislators crafted the Harkin-Engel Protocol, which was supposed to guarantee the wellbeing of chocolate growers, especially children. In fact, little has been done. So it’s up to us, the consumers.

You can help by buying fair trade chocolate. Greenamerica.org lists these Bay Area locations as sources of fairly traded chocolate. In San Francisco, Alter Eco and Global Exchange Fair Trade Store. In Pacifica,   Coco-Zen,   and in Petaluma  Sjaak’s Organic Chocolates.   You can also buy various sustainable and/or fair trade chocolates at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. Look for brands like Divine, Theo, and Equal Exchange. Greenamerica has a handy chart grading 15 makers, with Hershey’s at the bottom.

The good news: Fair trade certifiers and producers are growing their market share. According to Greenamerica.org,  “Over 50,000 cocoa growers in eleven countries are members of Fair Trade cooperatives. Fair Trade cocoa is grown in Belize, Bolivia, Cameroon, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Ghana, Haiti, Cote D’Ivoire, Nicaragua, and Peru.”


GMO food — boon or bane?

In Food Politics, Food to Avoid, GMO's, Take Action,
  • Posted on March 23, 2012
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Sustainability means living so that future generations have enough to live on. As it happens, a billion people today don’t have enough to eat. Advocates of biotechnology say that we can’t feed the hungry of the world without using genetically modified foods that are engineered to withstand droughts and other unfavorable growing conditions. This is hotly disputed by other people. At any rate, the GMOs we hear most about in this country are engineered to withstand pesticides – so that more pesticides can be applied to the fields they grow in. did you know that a large percentage of pesticides end up in soil, waterways, and our bodies?

The GMO science is complex, but if the products are safe to eat, perhaps the manufacturers should just label them. They have so far refused. Until April 22, you can add your name to a California petition to require labeling of GMO foods. That’s it – just label it so we know what we’re choosing to eat.

 

 

We need citizen action because of the famous “revolving door” – government officials can get lucrative jobs after their public service, or even before. Monsanto is one of the biggest chemical companies and fights hard to push its products. Is it a coincidence that so many Monsanto executives have gone into government – or vice versa? See this astounding chart. A few examples: William Ruckelshaus was the first Chief Administrator of the EPA – and one of his other resume items is Member of the Monsanto Board of Directors. Carol Tucker-Foreman was a Monsanto lobbyist and became a consumer advocate in the Clinton White House. Hillary Clinton, now Secretary of State, worked at the Rose Law Firm, Monsanto’s counsel. Clarence Thomas, on the Supreme Court, worked for Monsanto as an attorney. The list of these people, representing both political parties, is very long.

In the meantime, you can choose organic food, which is not allowed to have GMO, and check out the Non GMO Shopping Guide for additional tips. It’s regrettable that an article about food has to deal with politics — but that’s where the future of sustainable food is taking place.


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