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.


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.


Good news on food and health

In Food to Avoid, Take Action,
  • Posted on February 8, 2012
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Trans fats are laboratory creations (few exist in nature) that extend food’s shelf life, which made them immensely popular with makers of processed foods, especially baked goods. We’ve known for a decade that in fact, they’re dangerous, raising levels of the “bad” cholesterol that can contribute to coronary heart disease. In 2003, the FDA required that food labels include them (“partially hydrogenated” is also a term used for trans fats). Health organizations worked hard to publicize the problem and people began avoiding these fat bomb ingredients.

So did it work?

Today the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a food industry watchdog, publicized some encouraging research which was conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and published here.A WSJ blog also took note. Bottom line: bans, labeling, and “voluntary” industry ingredient switches have succeeded in lowering the levels of the four commonest trans fatty acids in several hundred research subjects, by a collective 58%.

But don’t stop being watchful. CSPI also warns that some corporations are still selling trans fat-laden food. A report last month called out Sara Lee, Pepperidge Farm, and General Mills as some of the product lines to be wary of. Second, the FDA has a loophole: if a food has less than half a gram of trans fat per serving, it can be labeled as having none. Let’s hope that Girl Scouts really do get trans fats out of all their cookies, not just off the label. (And while they’re at it, get out the palm oil, which is responsible for environmental damage overseas.)

Sustainable food is healthy food, which supports life rather than undermining it. The CDC puts their advice to choose “foods free of synthetic sources of trans fats” right on their same page as enabling sustainability practices.


Bees, our pollinating allies

In Take Action, Toxins and Pesticides,
  • Posted on February 6, 2012
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You’ve probably heard that bees are our friends, pollinating many crops that we depend on for food – and for our state’s economy. To name just one, almonds, pollinated by bees, comprise a $1 billion California crop.  You’ve probably also heard that bees are in trouble, dying off in mysterious collapses of entire colonies over the last decade.

Many causes for these die-offs have been proposed, such as pesticides, mites, monoculture, pollution, viruses, and the stress of being shipped from one place to another to pollinate farms and orchards whose own bees have died. Frankly, I have always suspected that the confluence of all these factors has simply made life too difficult for our bee allies. A report in last month’s issue of Ground Truth, a publication of the Pesticide Action network, states, “The current consensus, however, is that the die-offs are likely driven by a causal complex in which pesticides, pathogens and nutrition each play a role.”

The weirdest thing I just learned about this (via the same report) is that bees near corn fields get the pesticide clothianidin not only from dust, soil, and pollen, but also from a process called, amazingly, “planter exhaust.” This occurs as follows: “Corn seeds are sown using an automated planting system that relies on air/vacuum mechanisms to space the seeds; in order to keep seeds treated with pesticides from sticking to one another, talc is used. This talc becomes contaminated and is then exhausted during planting, either down with the seed or into the air.”

Now what?  Well, we can tackle the human-caused threats one by one, starting with pesticides. We consumers can play a key role by shifting our food dollars to foods produced with minimal chemical assistance (aka organic).


Food with less packaging

In Take Action,
  • Posted on December 29, 2011
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Imagine getting more of your food with little or no packaging. Bananas, of course, are beautifully packaged by nature. You can already limit packaging when buying produce (if you bring your own reusable produce bags) and bulk items like flour and nuts (using bags the store provides). Oh, and if you grow some food, no paper or plastic at all. Or you could shop at a farmers’ market and bring your own cloth bags.  So it can be done! In fact, in my book I called it “Nude Food.”

This matters because, as you probably know, an immense amount of paper and plastic packaging is tossed into landfills every year. Did you know that 8,000 plastic bottles go into landfills around the world EVERY SECOND?  You can read more about crazy-making packaging in an article by Elizabeth Gettelman, who dug into a range of sources and found these tidbits:

•    Americans create a million tons of extra garbage every week between Thanksgiving and New Year.

•    In 2007, the average American threw away 520 pounds of packaging.

•    Globally, the packaging business is a $429 billion industry.

In one East Bay town, the environmental group Sustainable Lafayette is working with the city, the Chamber of Commerce, the waste authority, and the school district to reduce solid waste. The goal is to achieve 75% waste diversion. And food packaging is a large part of this. San Francisco has already banned plastic bags, and Seattle did the same this month. So there’s hope!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to help reduce this tragic waste. Remember your cloth bags when shopping.  Buy in bulk (even though the small juice cartons may be tempting if you have young children).  Favor products and manufacturers that have reduced their packaging.

Huge progress is being made, and you can be part of it.


Compassion in Action

In Animal Cruelty, Food to Avoid, In the News, Take Action,
  • Posted on October 5, 2010
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Nine survivors of shark attacks are now campaigning to save the species that terrify most people. But the truth is that humans are a greater danger to sharks than they are to us – we kill 100 million of them a year, while the Florida Museum of Natural History estimates that fewer than a dozen people a year are killed by sharks (see statistics here). Many shark species are threatened with extinction, partly due to human beings’ appetite for them.  Asians, for instance, consider shark fin soup a delicacy. To get the main ingredient, 73 million sharks a year are killed for this dish. After their fins are cut off, they are dumped back into the ocean to drown or bleed to death.

This is unacceptable to many people – including these nine survivors. Twenty-nine-year-old Achmat Hassiem was attacked during practice for his lifeguard duties – but even though he lost his foot, he hopes to save sharks. Australian navy diver Paul de Gelder, who lost his right hand and lower leg to a shark, agrees. “Regardless of what an animal does according to its basic instincts of survival, it has its place in our world.” (See news story here)

Peter Benchley, the author of the novel Jaws,belatedly realized this and later in life became a protector of sharks, campaigning to educate people about them. An annual award is given in his name by the Shark Research Institute to the person or group that makes outstanding contributions to shark conservation.

What can you do to help? Don’t order shark fin soup.

*This story is also found on the Examiner.com


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