Still Not Good Enough?!

I am a vegetarian and have been so for quite some time now...relatively. However, I did not become a vegetarian for environmental reasons, instead it stemmed from health and spiritual (moral?) reasons. When I was seven years old I stopped eating red meat, much to my father's sadness. My father, while a corporate businessman during the week, is an amazing Italian chef on the weekends. Or at least he should have been. I digress; the point is that even though my father always cooked everything to perfection, leaving everyone's taste buds longing for more, I just could not digest meat properly. So instead of having a constant upset stomach and feeling lethargic, I just decided to never eat it again, and I haven't since. That was as far as I thought I would ever go, until two years later my parents, brother, and I took a month-long trip to a small town in India. It was a life-altering journey because it was the first, and only, time in my life when I experienced peace. The tiny town in the Punjab Valley, was isolated from all the mayhem of the cities and it was completely self-sustaining. The residents fed from their own farming, purified and recycled all of their own water, and lived on a lacto-vegetarian diet. There, the law of the land was serenity and harmony; to each other and to their surroundings. So much love and care went towards the land that they worked, they truly respected their environment because they knew that without it, they would not longer be around. It was unlike any other place I had ever been to, and as I grew up and moved from country to country, that place still remained in my mind as the best place on Earth. Whenever it seems like all hope is lost and this world is just too much, I just refer to that place as a beacon of light, because it proved to me that peace in this world is a possibility, we just have to make it a priority.

After we got back, I knew I eventually wanted to be a vegetarian, but it was a very slow yet steady transition. My mother has been a vegetarian for about thirty years, and while she never tried to force her vegetarianism on us, it definitely made an impact because I always knew that being a vegetarian wasn't this crazy-scary thing that was going to make me unhappy, pale, and sick. Instead, I always saw how much fun my dad was having when he would experiment in the kitchen and create some new dish for her...and how much fun my mom had eating it!

Little by little, as I believed more and more in karma (I know, I'm so weird), I would give up different animal products. One year it was ham, then it was turkey, later still eggs. Then when we moved back to Venezuela and I learned that the chicken was blasted with hormones, I thought it was a good time to give that up too. The hardest thing to give up was seafood...I LOVED seafood! In fact, I didn't think I was going to have the will-power to give up seafood until after college. Not to mention, I love eating out, and I know how unpleasant that can be for my mother, especially in Latin America where waiters look at you with an odd face and ask you if carrots and lettuce is okay. I'm not a rabbit! (okay I'm exxaggerating, people don't treat us THAT badly...anymore) But one day I just kind of didn't want to eat it anymore (again, weird).

It wasn't until college that the whole environmental factor kicked in to the equation. People would ask me if I was a vegetarian for environmental reasons and I would be puzzled. I never really heard of people being vegetarian solely for environmental reasons. So, I started reading about it and realized what an important issue it really was. I thought, cool! One more reason to be healthy!

But now in the readings I find out that that's not even good enough!! Nothing is really good enough for the environment unless you eat exclusively locally-grown foods. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for that, however like Serena mentioned, I don't always have the time to find a farmer's market. Thankfully many places like Whole Foods and Safeway are beginning to offer locally-grown goods, but now when I don't buy locally-grown goods, I feel uber guilty...sometimes I don't even enjoy my food (which to an Italian, is a sin!).

What I will say about my newly developed environmental food awareness is that I am more careful of where my food comes from and if it comes in too much packaging. Also, I am buying less cheese...and to anyone who knows me, that is saying A LOT!!! Cheese is the love of my life and by slightly considering going vegan just proves how much I love the environment. But haha that would probably mean that I would eat more soy products, and hence, do the same amount of damage, if not more! :(

I think that the food I eat that probably makes the most amount of damage to the environment is hummus! I buy a party-sized, plastic-packaged hummus container bi-weekly that is imported from Lebanon...talk about carbon footprint!

"Poultritarianism"

Since I was about 14 years old, I've consciously thought about my food choices, although not necessarily for reasons relating to their environmental impact. During my freshman year in High School I decided to experiment with vegetarianism. After reading a series of articles/publications on the brutal torture of animals used methodically to produce the majority of the foodstuffs we as Americans consume on a daily basis, as well as a rather nasty bout of food poisioning after consuming a Kobe-beef burger at my favorite restaurant downtown, I decided a life without meat wouldn't necessarily hurt. Growing up in a city, with relatively health-conscious parents, I learned of negative urban consumption patterns, and for a period, lived them as well. I knew how easy it was to simply pick up a prepackaged meal after a hectic day of school, or skip on an apple and instead enjoy a bag of potato chips. These habits were simply a matter of convenience in a place where eating consciously seemed out of the question. For example, how were we to know that the produce we were buying at our local market was actually organic? And products that claimed to be "locally grown"? Where exactly was this local growing occuring?? Certainly not anywhere within the busy streets of Manhattan, or so we hoped. To this end, we were also subservient to an added cost to all of our items simply as a consequence of our living on an island, which required further transportation costs to deliver the items we consume. Surely, when we vacationed elsewhere during the Summer, my parents would make an honest effort to buy all of our produce and food at the local markets where is was more likely the products were actually locally grown and organic, and thus less detrimental to both our health and the environment. So, I decided one of the only ways I could do my part and slow the effects of our burden caused by overconsumption on the environment, as well as do my part for "animal rights", was to stop eating meat all together. Unfortunately, my dedication to this cause was inhibited not even a year after it began. After a visit to my doctor revealed I had developed "anemia", a condition in which low iron-levels result in bruising and other side-effects, and a subsequent visit to a nutritionist, both recommended that I increase my protein-intake, and recommended I at least imbibe in chicken, which I had sorely missed anyway. I still to this day avoid all meats besides chicken.

But what other food choices am I making, that are perhaps subconscious, that are effecting the environment?? Although I intellectually support local/organic markets, I can't always afford to shop purely at the farmer's market, for both time & fiscal constraints. To this end I often buy my food at Safeway, where the products production sources are generally unknown, and the caloric-input required to create the product is even more difficult to calculate. At least when one is buying food-stuffs at a local market, it is assumed that the meat is mostly grass-fed, and the transportation costs are minimal because of the proximity of the farms on which the products were made. Although these local products are often pricier than supermarket goods, which, to most students, seems like an inferior option, the readings for this week demonstrate that we are actually incurring a higher long-term cost to ourselves by buying mass-produced goods. These goods tend to be a result of centralized systems in exponentially more energy-input is required to reep what are nearly the same amount of output as local/organic production systems.


This, and the section of the "Oil We Eat" article that discusses the positives and negatives of vegetarianism were revealing to me. For even though vegetarians, and in some sense "poultritarians" (as my classmates labeled me), saves energy by eating food at its most primary state, many vegetable and foods consumed by vegetarians are still processed, and thus require nearly the same energy output as many meat products, such as soy-based products. Unfortunately, I eat soy-products--burgers, tempeh, milk, etc., on an almost daily basis, and therefore am perhaps cancelling out any positive effects my vegetarianism has had on the environment.

I guess then the only way we can really be conscious about our food choices is by eating purely locally-grown/organic foods, in which the animals are grass-fed instead of grain-fed, and where transportation costs are lower (requiring less overall energy, fossil-fuel, input). While I have always felt that my chicken consumption, although somewhat infrequent, has been the most ecologically harmful, I now understand that my consumption of processed foods on a larger scale, is harmful as well, and perhaps equally detrimental to my consumption of chicken.

I like meat...Do you hate me?

Like Leigh Ann, I only started to think about my food choices when I started college. But even then, my thoughts about the foods I consumed were more related to concerns about healthy and vitality than concerns about the environment. An example of this would probably be my family's decision to have "Meatless Mondays" each week for about 2 months. We tried out this plan, not over concerns about the environment, but as an initiative to eat more vegetables and get healthier I assume. I don't think it was a very popular move and we went back to eating meat.

If the vegetarian diet works for you, that's great. And if the vegan diet works for you, I applaud you and your efforts. I think a lot of us make choices about the foods we eat based on dietary or health concerns. For me, I don't remember when a great deal of people were becoming aware or concerned about their food and the impact on the environment. It may sound awful or it may sound selfish, but I don't think I could give up meat. Why? Steak, burgers, fried chicken, etc...I'm not sure if you need more of a reason that that. Granted, it's not the most academic or sophisticated answer, but I'm only being honest.

I do care about the environment, but at the same time I'm sure a lot of people may feel the same way I do. We cut corners and do other things for the environment in different ways and at different times. There should be a compromise along the way right?

I ate meat every day last week for dinner. My guess is that it had the most impact on the environment over anything else I ate. Like Leigh Ann, I remember reading something about the amount of grains needed to feed the animals that we consume. If I remember correctly, the level of energy is reduced as we go up the food chain and it becomes less efficient to eat chicken than plants or vegetables.

The True Cost of Chicken

I am not going to attempt to lie on my blog! It was only when I got to college that I started really thinking about my food choices and how they might affect the environment and how they actually came to be on my plate. When you are little you are kind of spoon fed with food and ideas about food that it takes a long time to realize, oh this is a cow, this comes from a tree or this took the hands of five migrant workers to pick. It was not until I was in high school and definitely in college that I really started to think about where my food was coming from. My major here is International Relations and my specialization is Africa, so I have always been pretty aware of how we (the United States) extract resources from Africa. Yet, it is to such a greater scale then this, and resources, including food put so much impact on the environment and especially the people who live there. We talked about this idea in class with ruined resources, ruined people. I truly believe that. However in the United States we still have the luxury of ignorance about where our food comes from. When we walk into any Safeway of Giant, all we see is beautiful colors, beautiful produce and money to be spent. Foods are packaged beautifully, making our lives easier. It was not until I studied abroad in South Africa that I was truly aware of the difference. While walking through a very poor, predominately black neighborhood on the outskirts of Cape Town called Langa, I saw a huge fire burning, and a strange smell coming from the fire. As I got closer and looked in the fire, I saw goat heads, being discarded and burned. When I kept walking past the meat station, I later saw goats and various other animals being slaughtered, skinned and gutted. These people cook and kill for themselves. The majority of Americans have never stepped inside a slaughter house, and the animal they are eating gets lost in the processing and packaging. I am not claiming to be a saint, this is definitely the case for me and I have been struggling with eating meat for a long time. I want to give it up so badly for ethical reasons, but I love meat so much and eat it at least once a day.

When I make food choices I think where is this food really coming from, and how much energy had to be spent to get this food in my hand, looking like this? I also try to think about how the animals were raised, if it is meat. I now realize how spoiled I am being an American, and living in a city. I do not have to kill my own food; I can walk into a market and get food that is pre-packaged, pre-cooked, pre anything! That is the one thing I wish everyone could realize. Even if you do not think daily about your environmental impacts and food choice, just at least acknowledge that we are so lucky. With vegetables and fruits in particular I think about pesticides and herbicides that may have been sprayed on them to keep critters off. Also, with wheat and basically everything else I eat I now think about hybrid crops, and wonder if everything I am truly eating is a product of hybridization.

Out of all the foods I had eaten last week, I think the one with the biggest environmental impact is probably my meat, of which I eat mostly chicken. I say this because the amount of energy it takes to raise and slaughter chickens, I think, is higher than what it might take to grow crops. They need food, water and shelter. I remember reading in my other environmental class that for each pound of meat produced it took something like three times as much grain to feed that animal. So in this way I think the raising of meat is really imbalanced. I think the raising of meat might have the highest environmental impact, and am excited to see what the true answer is in class.

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.