How do our food choices affect climate change, land use, local economies, world trade? A movement is emerging to connect people more directly with the foods they buy, an ethic that looks at the hidden costs of our current food system. (A similar discussion about the hidden costs of our material culture has yet to reach mass consciousness , but that’s another topic.) Two recent articles add to the accumulating wisdom that says buy whole foods, buy local, go organic, and cut down on meat.
Last fall, Cornell researchers compared the amount of land needed to maintain various diets based on New York agriculture.
“A person following a low-fat vegetarian diet, for example, will need less than half (0.44) an acre per person per year to produce their food,” said Christian Peters, M.S. ‘02, Ph.D. ‘07, a Cornell postdoctoral associate in crop and soil sciences and lead author of the research. “A high-fat diet with a lot of meat, on the other hand, needs 2.11 acres.”
Surprisingly, however, a vegetarian diet is not necessarily the most efficient in terms of land use.
According to the findings, supplementing a mostly plant based diet with small amounts of meat uses less prime agricultural land, because animals can be pastured on more marginal acreage. For more info, read here.
The second article comes from the North Country Kitchen column in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise by Yvona Fast who maintains a website at wordsaremyworld.com. This article, written for Earth Day sums up a commonsense approach to eating “green.” As she says,
By reducing waste, recycling, using fewer resources, and buying locally raised, pastured meat and organically grown vegetables at farmer’s markets, you can honor the earth’s bounty and sustain natural resources. Waste less food, produce less greenhouse gas, and consider how your food choices affect the rest of the world.
You can read the rest of her article here.
While looking up info about tents, I happened upon this site documenting a couple’s (Michelle Ferrarese and Marty Heller) bike trip in Michigan in 2006 visiting CSAs around the state. They visited 31 farms ranging from 4 to 250 shares each. The photo blog, and the documentary they made (you can see the short version here) give an idea of the variety of ways that people are growing food for themselves and their neighbors. There’s plenty of inspiration here for growers and eaters!
