Trade offs

[eqfe]

"Eat food, not too much, mainly plants

Comments

[whatisbiscuits]

You can only do your best. Ideally we would all have enough space to grow our own food, but that's not real life anymore. Sometimes I buy food from local market stalls to try and help them out, but yesterday I bought some strawberries and noticed when I got home that they came from Palestine, and felt guilty because of the air miles and that they're probably diverting huge amounts of water from the local landscape to grow them.

As people say above, its probably best to eat whats in season as then it's more likely to be local. I find the BBC food website good for this in the UK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/seasons/ -it lists all the foods in season for the month you're in, for instance at the moment here its cauliflowers, leeks, cabbages, clams, cockles, parsnips, sea bass and venison.

[sammason]

Thanks for the BBC link. I'm in the UK too.

[small_chicken]

I mostly think local. Organic food here costs waaaayyy too much to be considered, and anyway I'm not entirely sure that the trade-offs are necessarily worthwhile. But the supermarkets here label the countries of origin, so that makes eating local (or relatively local, anyway) easy. The kiwis we eat do come from New Zealand, and bananas from Costa Rica, but I don't feel too badly about container ships, which are some of the most fuel-efficient forms of transport out there. I've started cutting back on oranges, because they're mostly from Spain and Italy and need trucking.

The one thing that continues to flummox me is meat. I don't eat it, but my boyfriend is one of those who gets tired if he doesn't have it. But meat is weird: it's raised in Germany, slaughtered in Poland (or vice versa), butchered in Ireland, before making its way to where I live (the Netherlands). I always look at the labels and wonder "WTH?" and try to pick out the cuts that haven't made the circuitous journey.

[sammason]

Do you try to reduce the distances travelled by the live animals before slaughter? This is an issue I hear talked about at work (I do research related to farm livestock) but I don't claim to be any kind of expert on it. It's not always the choice of the individual farmer, I do know that much.

[small_chicken]

Any distance, really...I just don't understand the point of having a cow raised across the border being transported--in pieces or otherwise--all over the continent before it ends up in our supermarket (we live right next to the German border).

[theartdyke]

I try not to be too hardcore about anything except meat. I won't eat anything except pastured meat because I think factory farmed meat is too great an evil in too many ways to ever support even a little

[lovebri]

Local is pretty ambiguous. It can be good, but its definition does not require that it be good. Yes, less food miles can mean less environmental degradation in terms of emissions. However, local could be packed with chemicals, unfair to employees, etc. By definition, organic means no chemicals, which is good for the environment, people, and the plants themselves (unless the USDA messes it up more). Hypothetically, if I buy local pineapples from a farm with human rights abuses as well as chemicals and lots of energy to make them grow in this environment or season, that's problematic. Versus pineapples grown in Hawaii or the Caribbean, which is a more suitable environment, by well-paid employees without chemicals or large amounts of energy input, and these pineapples are picked ripe and shipped quickly and efficiently, maybe in my dreamworld hypothetical, through solar or wind power. So these fruits are more nutritionally dense, came from a better environment all around, and may have used less energy than a local farm