Of Twix and Tuna

I don't always have the environment in mind when I make my food choices. Sometimes I just go for what's on sale. Thinking about how my food choices affected the environment started for me during college. In high school, vegetarianism and buying local were misunderstood by me as simply driven by: a) vegetarians who felt bad for the animals, and b) people who bought local for convenience or to be able to say they supported local farmers--I did not then know the logistical reasons behind buying locally. Now, I'm a little better educated--a little more aware of how the world actually works, and am not just colored by the perceptions I have of the people near me. Consequently, when I think about the environment as I shop for food, these are the things I think about: is this local? is this genetically modified (not that it's labeled)? how far away did this come from?

In other words, when buying food and thinking about the environment I'm thinking about the individual/household effect buying locally grown foods versus fruit shipped from Chile, or Mexico. I'm not always able to go to a farmers market to buy locally grown foods, but I have been known to shop there in the past. Also, while shopping, I sometimes wonder whether the fruit I'm buying is a GMO, but since there's really no way to tell, I kind of stop thinking there (at least while purchasing the food, I've encountered the topic a multitude of times outside of the marketplace).

I also sometimes think about the cost of production of meat as well, but since that's more of a "going out somewhere" thing to eat for me, those sort of thoughts don't often occur in grocery stores. One thing I do eat, that sometimes makes me hesitate, is tuna. Tuna are secondary feeders: they eat other fish. (And I eat them.) Eating tuna is controversial environmentally because of overfishing and other incidents such as the accidental netting of dolphins and other hapless marine creatures due to overefficient netting practices.

Of everything I ate in those two days, what I think had the most environmental impact was probably the Twix. (I didn't eat any meat.) Why? Well, first of all, look at the ingredients:

Milk Chocolate (Sugar, Cocoa Butter, Milk Ingredients, Cocoa Mass, Lactose, Soy Lecithin, Polyglycerol Polyricinoleate, Artificial Flavour), Enriched Flour (Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Sugar, Hydrolyzed Palm and Palm Kernel Oil, Corn Syrup, Milk Ingredients, Dextrose, Salt, Cocoa Mass, Sodium Bicarbonate, Soy Lecithin, Soybean Oil, Artificial Flavour.

Making Twix involves producing and transporting, grain, chocolate (sugar, chocolate, milk), palm and kernel oils, corn syrup, salt, and soy beans, among other things. The grain (enriched flour) and corn syrup (corn) alone take a great deal of energy to produce, convert into flour/syrup, send to the makers of Twix to turn into the candy bar, and then ship to the Safeway or CVS that it was purchased from.