Want to Cut Your Carbon Footprint? Change the Way You Eat

Most of us probably already know the basic changes we can make in our lifestyles to reduce our impact on the planet's resources and cut our contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. We can recycle, replace our traditional incandescent light bulbs with CFL (compact flourescent light) bulbs, and bike or walk instead of taking the car whenever possible.

But another way we can have a significant impact on our carbon footprint is one we easily overlook: we simply change the way we eat.

Mark Bittman's Food Matters is not just another best-selling “green” consciousness-raising tome. Instead, it presents a simple idea in clear engaging prose that only takes up a little less than half the book. The rest is full of shopping lists, meal plans, and recipes to make it easy for the reader to put the ideas into action. Since Mark Bittman is also a renowned chef and general “foodie,” this section of the food is well worth looking into.

Bittman doesn't argue that you must eat organic or become a vegetarian or only buy locally grown food. His approach is not at all dictatorial. Any change you make towards eating more “whole” foods (an apple, not little tins of applesauce, peanuts rather than a Snickers bar, potatoes rather than chips) anything rather than processed foods will be good for your health, easier on your wallet, and better for the planet.

Food Matters singles out one important destructive dietary trend. As more and more countries, including China, adopt the Western diet with its emphasis on red meat and refined carbohydrates, the world will no longer be able to sustain current practices for raising animals for food (for example, global meat consumption is expected to double in the next forty years).

Factory farms already raise 60 billion of these animals every year in conditions that would have been unthinkable a century ago, but if demand keeps growing at current rates, we will need to raise 120 billion animals a year by 2050, and we will run out of the agriculture land necessary to raise the feed for all these cows, pigs, sheep, and poultry.

It's not just that a heavily meat-based diet is unsustainable, but as Bittman points out, it is also highly consumptive of fossil fuels. “To produce one calorie of corn takes 2.2 calories of fossil fuel. For beef the number is 40: it requires 40 calories to produce one calorie of beef protein,” (26).

Statistics from the Energy Information Administration of the Department of Energy suggest that the average American burns about 530 gallons of gas by driving and about 400 gallons of fossil fuels if that same American consumes an average American meat-based diet.

As Bittman puts it, “If we each at the equivalent of three fewer cheeseburgers a week, we'd cancel out the effects of all the SUVs in the country,” (17).

And raising the meat we love to eat doesn't just consume a whole lot of fossil fuels, it also contributes to the rapid deforestation of the third world as rainforest is burned in Brazil to make way for cattle ranching and sugar production for ethanol, and Malyasia and Indonesia see the destruction of their forests to foster the production of palm oil, another common ingredient in processed food.

To make matters worse, the methane produced by cattle is also a significant part of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions and the huge amounts of manure threaten both water and air quality in many parts of rural America.

Bittman's second nightmare food ingredient also leads back to the production of corn but this time in the form of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Most Americans consume HFCS in the form of carbonated soft drinks like Coke, Pepsi, 7-Up and Sprite; as an aside Bittman notes that as a nation we actually consume 7% of our daily calories from soda. Not only does the consumption of sugar in this form tend to generate a greater craving for more and more sugar, but it's believed to be a leading contributor to the rise in Type 2 diabetes, especially among the young.

Now I'm going to follow Bittman's lead in not dictating any particular way of eating. But I do recommend a trip to the library or bookstore to check out Food Matters.

And I will ask my readers: Please consider giving up meat one or two days a week. Or if this is too much, keep the HFCS out of your grocery basket. An apple on your desk, a packet of trail mix in your purse, a refillable water bottle in your car will all go a long way towards keeping you and our planet healthy.

Bon appetit!