How our food choices can help save the environment.
Whether you are trying to slim down, bulk up, or achieve your optimal nutritional health, there is a diet plan for everyone. But as you trim pounds from your waistline, are they being added to your carbon footprint?
No matter what you eat, your diet will impact the environment, because all food requires inputs of energy from multiple sources to be produced. So the question becomes – “If there is a diet tailored to improving insulin tolerance, is there one for minimizing the environmental impact of food production, transportation, and consumption?”
The answer is “not really,” but some dietary choices will have less environmental impacts and can be more sustainable than others.
Eating Well with Canada’s Food Guide is designed to optimize the average person’s health; however, this meat and animal product based plan may have adverse environmental effects. According to the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), one-third of cultivable land is used for industrial livestock production worldwide, most of which is used to grow grain to feed the animals. Recommended Canadian food guide proportions suggest two daily servings of meat and three of dairy products. These demands for animal byproducts exacerbate the problems of land use.
The Mediterranean Diet, recently popularized in North America, promotes cardiovascular health and may reduce some of the negative impacts of a high-protein or animal-based diet by limiting meat and dairy consumption. Traditionally observed in Greece, Spain, and Southern Italy, the diet recommends a high consumption of fresh fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains and olive oil, a moderate consumption of fish and dairy, and limited consumption of red meat.
Unfortunately, Guelph is not in the Mediterranean, and any olive oil purchased here must be imported, which generates unnecessary carbon emissions. Even before transportation, one litre of Greece’s Sellás olive oil has a carbon footprint of 2.36 kilograms of carbon dioxide, much of which is due to olive oil’s carbon-intensive extraction process. A less intensive, but similarly heart-healthy oil, such as Canadian-grown canola oil, may be a better option.
Perhaps the most environmentally driven food plan is the “locavore” movement, with its followers restricting their diets to locally grown food. The concept of “local,” however, is up for individual interpretation, with food production boundaries ranging from a 100 kilometre radius to “I’ll purchase what I can at the Farmer’s Market, but anything else is fair game,” The locavore diet aims to reduce the distance that food travels, thus reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transportation.
But does Wellington County chicken truly have a lesser “mileage” than one raised in, say, New York? What if the Wellington County farmer imports feed from Mexico, but the New York chicken eats grain from a neighbouring farm? Now which chicken is the more informed choice? And what if you jet off to Hawaii simply because you have a craving for pineapple and mahi mahi? Does that still count as eating local?
Deciding which foods or diet plan will minimize your carbon footprint can be overwhelming. As if choosing between chocolate and white milk or deciding which brand of cereal to buy wasn’t hard enough already! As with most things, making environmentally informed choices about food takes practice, but the decision is just as important and logical as comparing foods over taste or nutritional content.
Michael Pollan, the modern era’s food guru and author of An Omnivore’s Dilemma, recommends three rules for eating wisely, both nutritionally and environmentally: eat food, not too much, and mostly plants. Maybe we should consider a fourth rule, and stay informed of the origins of our food. Where is our food grown? How is it produced? Is it in season? What are the possible impacts it has on the environment?
There is no perfect guide to a sustainable diet, but if we keep up to date with current food practices, we can make the most informed choices to preserve the planet while still enjoying what it has to offer the palate.