Food & Environment: Eating To Save The Earth
By Linda Riebel & Ken Jacobsen

In this excerpt from the authors' book, Eating To Save The Earth, find out how to choose and prepare foods that are good for you and better for the planet, too. Howard Lyman, President of EarthSave International, calls this book "required reading for everyone. This message could save the world for our children and grandchildren."

Our planet faces many dangers: global warming, ozone thinning, rain forest destruction, water and air pollution, species extinctions, and topsoil depletion, to name a few. Our food choices have an impact. The way we grow food is part of the problem. We use so much machinery, pesticides, irrigation, processing, and transportation that for every calorie that comes to the table, 10 calories of energy have been expended. Experts once found that a 5 calorie strawberry was flown to New York at a cost of 435 calories of energy.

Food also causes other problems: 15 metric tons of soil are lost annually to feed each US resident because our agricultural practices erode soil. This amounts to 2 billion tons of soil a year. Almost 40 percent of the world's agricultural land is seriously degraded. Modern agriculture causes about one quarter of the risk of climate change.

Another danger is the quantity and kind of foods we choose. We eat too much contributing to an alarming rise in obesity. Restaurant portion sizes have increased, in some cases, by 100 percent. More restaurants are serving gigantic portions. One restaurant in Texas offers a meal of a 72 ounce steak plus shrimp cocktail, potato, salad, and bread. The meat industry is the second largest environmental threat. Only cars pose a greater risk. We overpackage food and expect to have out-season produce, which is grown thousands of miles away. Wild salmon and other fish are endangered from overfishing.

Recently, the Audubon Society reported that the earth could feed 10 billion people who eat as citizens of India do, 5 billion who eat like Italians, but only 2.5 billion who eat like Americans. According to Alan Durning, founder of Northwest Environment Watch, "The prospect of 5 billion people eating the way Americans do is an ecological impossibility, requiring more grain than the world can grow and more energy, water, and land than the world can supply."

Containing our population is obviously part of the solution. Changing our patterns of consumption is another part. This book will show you how your food choices can help the earth and yourself.

Time and money

You may be thinking, "How can I afford to save the earth? Who has the time or money." People love the idea of saving the earth, but wonder how they'll find time and money to do it. Below we suggest things you can do, depending on whether you have more time, more money, or not enough of either.

You have more time than money

• Cook at home rather than eating at restaurants or buying convenience foods
• Brown bag your meals at work, school, or volunteer activities
• Grow your own food Use leftovers
• Compost the scraps
• Volunteer at an environmental organization
• Join a community garden
• Share extras with local food banks
• Avoid excess packaging

You have more money than time

• Buy organic foods
• Join a farm through community supported agriculture
• If you buy prepared and frozen food, choose vegetarian
• Patronize green restaurants
• Avoid excess packaging

Broke and busy: not enough time or money

• Learn one good soup or stew recipe for using leftovers
• Buy from earth friendly producers
• Practice one of our suggestions at a time
• Spread the knowledge in this book to friends, family, coworkers, and members of your community

Your four most important decisions

Most of our recommendations boll down to four key decisions:

• Less meat, dairy, fish, and eggs
• Less processing, packaging, and waste
• More organic foods
• More diversity

You can decide which recommendations make the most sense for you. One person may make changes in three areas, while another may focus on one. If you decide to keep meat in your diet, you might change the kind and amount. If you're a vegetarian, you can reduce packaging and increase your purchase of organics.

By far the heaviest burdens our diet places on the planet are meat and other foods of animal origin. Animals raised for food eat a large percentage of our grain crops, require millions of gallons of water, and give off waste that pollutes rivers, groundwater, and soil. Modern factory farming crowds animals into such unhealthy conditions that they need huge doses of antibiotics just to survive, and producers give them hormones to make them grow faster than nature intended. These chemicals enter our environment and our bodies, where some remain for long periods.

Add to this the damage to human health caused by a meat heavy diet and the huge medical costs required to treat them. Cholesterol heavy diets contribute to heart disease, atherosclerosis, stroke, and hypertension. Diets lower in animal products are the healthiest, according to Harvard University, the Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine, and the American Dietetic Association.

• Seven calories of vegetation are required to make one calorie of food of animal origin
• Leaks from hog waste cesspools pollute thousands of miles of river and kill millions of fish.

The environmental impact of any food, say, a green bean depends partly on how it gets to your table. You have five choices.

1.) Growing your own food has the least impact on the environment. You can purchase a pound of green bean seeds and invest your time for weeding, watering, pest control, and perhaps using some fertilizer.

2.) If your green beans come from a local farmers market or produce stand, they have traveled far less than the average food, which travels 1,300 miles to your table. They might come from small-scale growers who have chosen earth friendly farming practices.

3.) You can purchase your green beans from a supermarket produce department, probably the product of large scale agriculture, which uses pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and long distance transportation.

4.) You can purchase them canned or frozen, grown by large-scale agriculture. This includes all the environmental costs associated with supermarket produce, plus materials and energy used in canning or freezing.

5.) You can have them as a side dish in a frozen dinner entree. This includes all the costs associated with canned or frozen produce, plus more non-recyclable packaging and more additives, since the vegetables are fully cooked for inclusion in a frozen dinner.

Agribusiness grows most of its products for processing rather than for the fresh vegetable market; it's more profitable. Eighty percent of snap bean production in 1994 was grown for processing. We spend over $5 billion annually on frozen dinners and entrees. However, processing involves equipment to wash, sort, cook, and package the food. It displaces workers, since one mechanical harvester can replace as many as 100 manual pickers and their supervisors. This minimizes harvesting costs, but there is some reduction in quality. Then there is the environmental cost of building the machines (steel, plastic, etc.), the cost of the pollution generated by the operation of the machine, and the loss of employment for many of our nation's neediest residents.