Food Choices for Healthy People and a Healthy Planet

All posts in Uncategorized



credit  exfordy on flickr

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I was writing The Green Foodprint, I checked out some of the quaint devices you can buy to make cooking “easier.” I located the following:

  •  Microwaveable ice cream scoop
  • Cherry pitting device
  • Home cotton candy maker
  • Oddly shaped pan that bakes brownies with more edges
  • Gadget that cuts up a hot dog to look like an octopus.
  • Microwave s’more maker
  • Avocado knife

While one might applaud the ingenuity, I shook my head over the waste of metal, plastic, packaging, trucking, and electricity that go into manufacturing, distributing, and using these ridiculous toys. But wait! There’s more! You can also get a stainless steel lobster fork, a toaster with a Darth Vader design, a voice-recognition electronic grocery list organizer (for a mere $150), and an espresso machine that (I kid you not) recognizes your fingerprint so it will make your drink just the way you like it, without all that exhausting pushing of buttons on regular espresso machines. This toy will set you back $3,200.

Seems I’m not the only one scratching her head at this technology gone wild. A New York Times reporter also found people who confessed to having purchased an automatic polenta maker, escargot tongs, milk frothing machines, and a panini press. It appears that Rube Goldberg is alive and well in the design department of manufacturers desperate to part you from your money.

Here’s the main advice I give in The Green Foodprint: Use your muscles to chop, stir, peel, and all the rest. You’ll be healthier for it – and so will the earth.




You’ve heard that in nature, there’s no such thing as waste. Yet in America, the amount of food that we waste every year is staggering. A study found that we waste millions of tons of food a year — 29% of all we produce – at many points, from farm, to packer, to store, to table.

Given that there are so many hungry people in this country, that’s a tragic loss. But the study pointed out another consequence that I hadn’t thought of before: the entire life cycle of growing, packaging, transporting, and disposing of all this waste produces 2% of our greenhouse gas emissions, over a hundred million tons of carbon dioxide a year. Meanwhile, a staffer for the Natural Resources Defense Council found that the average American family of four loses up to $175 a month in wasted food, and included some interesting charts she gleaned from the report mentioned in the first paragraph.

We can stop this waste and eat healthily and creatively. An article with the provocative title “That’s Not Trash, That’s Dinner”  gave several ideas for using those thick broccoli stalks: peel and chop them to make soup, or shred them to put into broccoli slaw, or shave them and top with lemon zest and Parmesan cheese.

What you can do:

  • If you buy a new or special ingredient on impulse (and that’s not a bad thing, since diversity in diet is good for us and for the earth), be sure to use it right away.
  • Enjoy leftovers. This is your chance to learn new recipes, or put on your creative hat and invent something original. My own theory is that some of our favorite dishes evolved from the combination of leftovers and necessity.
  • Compost the scraps that aren’t salvageable (heavy cauliflower leaves and stalks, for instance, and the odd bits you scrape off your plate after dining). Once you see the beautiful black rich soil that food scraps turn into in the compost bin, you’ll be amazed you ever thought of food scraps as garbage.

Or you could check out The Green Foodprint, which I published last year (2011).




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.




By now you may have heard of a weird trend – women are having feeding tubes inserted down their throats so they can be given low doses of nutrients through the naso-gastric tube (“the K-E diet”) and not eat food at all. The goal? Lose 20 pounds in 10 days. This lunacy would be hard to believe, unless you’ve been observing the desperate measures and weight-loss scams people have tried over the last 50 years, which I have done.

istockphoto

As a licensed psychologist, retired after 25 years* of treating people with eating disorders, I can officially tell you this is INSANE. We’ve known for years that crash weight loss is a sure recipe for weight gain the minute you return to a normal diet, even if the new normal diet is better than your pre-crash food choices.

In our world of sugary, fatty foods available everywhere, and reduced need for exercise, and “convenience” foods full of sugar, salt, and fat, it’s hard for a lot of people to maintain a healthy weight. As one expert stated in an article I co-authored,  “If you wanted to see what is the environment that would maximize the rate of weight gain, we’ve more or less created it.”

So it’s not totally the fault of the overweight individual. If a structured support system is necessary for you, try Weight Watchers, a sensible system that works for many people.

If you know someone who’s toying with the idea of trying this tube feeding fad, just politely say, “Ok, but first let’s go shopping for a complete wardrobe for you in the bigger size you will attain after you try this racket.”

As an advocate for food that is healthy for person and planet, I recommend the Mediterranean diet, which is NOT a get-rich fad plugged by some phony “expert,” but an accepted medical term meaning food choices rich in fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and low in meat and dairy. Better yet, no meat, dairy, or fish! (That’s the part that’s good for the planet. Need information? Visit sfvs.org, the site of the San Francisco Vegetarian Society).

Here’s hoping you and the people you love know the life-affirming ways to reach and keep a healthy weight.

*The other 25 years occurred before my psychotherapy career, as I watched my mother and other people, mostly women, try to lose weight. I fell into the eating disorder and weight loss world myself, and emerged safely, determined to help others avoid it.




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.