Sustainable and Environmentally Friendly Eating
Friday, March 5th, 2010Even if you don’t stay up to date on current affairs, you can’t have missed the focusing in on environmental issues lately. Going back a couple of decades, not many people worried about where their grub tableware or clothing etc came from. They just paid their money and got what they wanted. This attitude is not sustainable however, and a shift in thinking is needed especially in these times of weak economy and global warming. Taking some time to think about where you get and how you consume your food can have a surprisingly big impact.
Shop Local. We have become complacent about being able to buy things like bananas all year round and having access to every spice under the sun. The fact this produce is sourced thousands of miles away has not long been in people’s consciousness and the impacts are large. Not only does the transport release vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, due to burning fuel and having to use a food and wine cooler to keep the produce chilled all the way, but also local food suppliers struggle to compete with low foreign costs. If you don’t want to see local businesses going under, make sure you support them and shop local as much as you can.
Choose Less Packaging. You only have to take a walk down one of the isles to see how much food packaging is wasted making products look pretty. A single cake might be individually wrapped, inside a small box with a plastic place-holder, which is wrapped in cellophane and transported inside a cardboard box, with the other cake boxes. It is often the case that such packaging is completely redundant, so do your bit and try to buy loose or sensibly wrapped goods.
Ethical Accessories. It is not only what food you buy than can have an effect on the planet. All sorts of things from which cutlery is used to which wine gifts bought for yourself or other can have just as much influence and the consumables themselves. Ask yourself where this product has come from, is it something that could be made from a more sustainable material, and is this a disposable product when I could be buying a reusable one? A good example of this is chopsticks as the disposable kind accounts for acres of lost rain forest every day.

