Today is Earth Day! Healthy eating and sustainable eating go hand in hand. Try one or more of these tips to help reduce your carbon footprint and improve the environment!
Support Your Local Community: Shop your local farmers market and buy locally produced items like fruits and vegetables. Eating food that’s in season where you live lets you choose the highest quality, most nutritious produce, while cutting down on imported foods that come with a heavy fossil fuel cost.
Try Meatless Meals: Meat production is inefficient and environmentally costly, it takes more water to raise cattle than it does to plant produce. Cattle ranching has contributed to forest destruction to make way for grazing land. Simply cutting back on your meat consumption can make a difference: try going meatless once a week – Meatless Monday!
Eat with the Seasons: A peach at the height of summer is fragrant, juicy, and flavorful. The same peach in winter, though, is hard, mealy, and bland, and has probably traveled many miles to get to your plate. Fresh fruits and vegetables tend to lose nutrients every day after they are picked, so locally grown in-season produce is high in nutrients & tastes better!
Grow Your Own: Growing a garden lets you enjoy fresh, delicious produce that tastes better than anything you could ever get at the store. It could save you money, and it also decreases your dependence on a food system that relies on fossil fuels to get produce to market.
Try New Things in the Kitchen: Knowing a few basic cooking techniques – how to make a stock, stir-fry vegetables, cook whole grains, whip up a salad dressing – can help you to reduce your carbon footprint and save you money. Restaurant meals and prepared foods require more water and energy to produce, and entail more waste. When you are at ease in the kitchen, you can find creative uses for leftovers, garden produce, and foods that are in season or on sale.
Limit Your Waste: A large amount of food is thrown away every day in the United States. Cutting down on waste is an easy and gratifying way to save money and reduce your impact on the earth. Shop with a menu in mind: buy small amounts of perishable foods (meat, dairy, fresh produce) at a time, and use them right away. Clean your fridge every week, so you can use what you have before it goes bad.