Food

Mindset of Change

Ok, are you in a mindset to contemplate food? Let's do it.

"The way forward is to eat better, more delicious food — to enjoy cooking and eating it more, not chaw away mindlessly at this seemingly endless supply of flavorless abundance."

Anthony Bourdain, Value the Things We Eat, NPR 2017

Food is a complex topic. It is essential for survival and good health. It is a primary vehicle for culture and community. To some, it is an art form. People have different relationships with food, but they are invariably personal and custom. Cost, taste, ethics, health, availability and convenience may all play a role.

For me, as an inveterate foodie, a sustainable diet has two baseline requirements:

1. I have to feel good and healthy
2. I have to enjoy my food

A world of nuance exists in these two simple requirements. Right off the bat, there is the balance between them. I may enjoy chowing a bag of Doritos, but I don't feel particularly good afterward. Fortunately, the average person has 28,835 days in their lifetime and if we eat three times a day thats 86, 505 opportunities for balance.

Then for requirement #1, we have the following prerequisites:

1. Nutritional completeness. I need my vitamins and minerals, enough calories to fuel me, enough protein for my muscles to recover quickly, and enough fiber to poop properly.
2. Quantity. Overeating is occasionally enjoyable, but so is eating when you're actually really hungry.
3. Timing. When I eat is quite important for feeling healthy. Nothing like the meat sweats combining with the night sweats after eating an entire charcuterie board at 9 pm to make you feel goblin-ish.

And then we have the prereqs for requirement #2:

1. Variety. Some people can eat the same thing every day. I am not one of them. This is also important for nutritional completeness.
2. Anticipation. Some people do not enjoy cooking or thinking about food. I am not one of them either. Quantity plays an important role here as well. Anticipation comes from scarcity.
3. Lack of guilt. Experiencing guilt from eating can lead to serious medical conditions like anorexia and serious social conditions like obnoxious vegans.

Each person must consider their own dietary requirements, and it is a worthwhile exercise to identify the occasions and conditions in which you feel really good about food.

Cooking with a partner? Sitting down with family? After a brisk hike? Maybe there are specific foods that mean comfort or fancy or indulgence to you. These emotional clues highlight what is essential to us about our diet that we need to sustain. But they also show us what is not as important. Maybe the roast at Christmas was never the real highlight and it was always too dry anyway. Or maybe it wasn't the burgers and beer that mattered after the game; it was the quality time together.

Food is personal, and so everyone needs to make their own choices about what sustainable means to them in this context. Just don't forget, you can change your mind and adapt over time, and eating less doesn't mean not eating at all.

Key Things to Consider

In my humble opinion, there are three general ways to improve your relationship with food for the benefit of yourself and the planet.

1 - Start paying attention to where your food comes from.

Although this certainly applies to what grocery store you shop at, it goes much deeper. The way food is produced and the ethics and standards that govern food industries influence not only what is available and how nutritious it is, but how natural resources like water and land are used across the country. The rabbit hole goes deep. I'll try to cover some main considerations in Sourcing, but specific industries deserve more in depth coverage.

2 - Eat less and more varied animal products.

Due to the way our food industries operate, almost all animal products require the taking of a life. This deserves respect. Not only to the animal when it is alive, but by not wasting it. Our ancestors generally ate meat only on special occasions, and were creative in their use of the whole animal.

Animal products are also, by and large, extremely inefficient. Large amounts of resources are needed to generate relatively few calories. In fact, “plant-based agriculture grows 512% more pounds of food than animal-based agriculture on 69% of the mass of land that animal-based agriculture uses.” (faunalytics.org)

3 - Pay attention to food waste.

It is one thing to use natural resources and encroach on ecosystems for a purpose. After all, people have been cultivating and farming land for thousands of years. Agriculture is the backbone of the human species. But it is another thing to waste those natural resources and heedlessly destroy ecosystems for nothing. In the US, almost 40% of food is wasted (feedingamerica.org).

In addition, organic waste that is sent to the landfill does not actually decompose and return the earth, but instead produces a powerful greenhouse gas called methane. (epa.gov) Practices like composting help reduce these emissions and return organic matter back to the soil, where it increases the nutrition of the food we eat.

Ethics

Crossing all of these are questions of ethics and morality - broadly considering ethics to be to be Right and Wrong and morality to be Good and Bad. I think its safe to say that anyone reading this who has looked even briefly into industrial animal farming will say there is something Wrong about it.

Maybe its the scale, or specific practices of specific corporations, or maybe just a general lack of respect. We'll try to explore it a bit more in some of the sections below, but suffice to say, 'animal husbandry' feels pretty euphemistic.

Beyond this, I think we all have to decide for ourselves. I certainly have my opinions, and I'll undoubtedly share them, but food is such a personal subject that broad prescriptions will not work. You need to find what is sustainable for you.

One Big Thing

I can give one general piece of advice, which is pretty well-grounded in science at this point.

There is a lot to learn about our food systems and the industries that govern it. Here are specific topics to examine more closely.

Note: I'm working on filling in each one of these. If you want to get the latest content as I write it, please subscribe!

1. Sourcing
2. Gardening
3. Meat
4. Fish
5. Dairy
6. Vegetables & Grains
7. Spices, coffee and chocolate
8. Composting & Food Waste
9. Pet food

Feeling discouraged? Don't worry. There are so many amazing people who are ahead of us. Here's some inspiration: