Friday, January 1, 2010
The first step.
I am starting this blog as a part of my 2010 New Year's resolution. My goal is to create an ethical culinary lifestyle that is still practical and satisfies my nutritional needs as a runner. I first became concerned about my eating habits after college when I realized I had gained about 20 pounds and my (limited) attempts to exercise away the pounds were not successful. Over the last five years, I have slowly modified my diet to be healthier with positive results, although I am still calorie conscious and concerned about losing (or really gaining) weight. In addition to these nutritional changes, I have adopted a new hobby of running. An active lifestyle requires proper nutrition, and it's not easy to make sure I'm getting everything I need without taking in too many calories. While these issues are important to me, I recently found a new reason to consider the food I was eating. After watching the documentary King Corn and reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, I had to acknowledge the numerous problems with our current food system. Animals are mistreated, the environment is damaged, and we consume more and more unhealthy and even dangerous food. I won't go into all the details in this inaugural post, but I can assure you that it's worse than you might think. Knowing the facts, I cannot possibly continue supporting this unsustainable and unethical system and exposing myself to unhealthy foods. Within the next few posts, I will outline my plan for a more ethical culinary lifestyle. I hope you will find my trials and tribulations useful in making your own positive changes.
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So ... here's what I've always wondered:
ReplyDeleteMarc says that the average American tosses 1 pound of food per day. I'm not sure if that's end-user waste, or if that rolls up food wasted due to overproduction, going stale at the store, etc. Supposing it's the former, the real waste is probably 2-3 times that amount, which becomes comparable to the [drastically high!!] amount of food actually consumed by a person in a day.
Thus, we have the potential to nearly halve our food production just by not overeating and producing the correct amount. Could that alone get rid of the resource issue (until even more people have even more babies...)? In other words, are we attacking the heaviest part of the problem? Are we approaching this in the most impactful way?
This definitely comes up in energy consumption: we obsess over cars' fuel usage, though (with the exception of very temperate climates) heating/cooling our homes dwarfs the energy we use driving around. We'd do much more by moving out of Arizona and Alaska than by trading in our clunkers for cash.