Wait, What's Sustainability?

Sustainability

Sustainability is basically what your hippie aunt means when she says she wants to “go green” or be “eco-friendly.” It means living your life comfortably without completely ruining the Earth. This might sound simple, but it's actually a really hard thing to do, especially when it comes to food. In this post, I’ll walk you through one day of unsustainable food habits and explain how I can help you avoid these pitfalls like a champ. 

So let’s talk about food:

Making and eating food becomes unsustainable when it produces too much waste or sends too many gross emissions or chemicals into the air, soil or water. Thinking about your average day of eating, you probably do a lot of this without even realizing it. 

breakfast

You wake up and your belly says it’s time for noms. You peel a 'nanner and throw that peel in the trash. It's now food waste that will go to a landfill and produce methane, a really mean greenhouse gas. You reach for the bread to make some toast, but it's moldy so to the landfill it goes, plastic baggie and all. 

Since that toast thing didn't work out it’s oatmeal time, aka coal-powered microwave time. You fire that bad boy up and pop a K-Cup in the Keurig while you’re waiting. That disposable K-Cup is plastic, which means it might swim over to the Pacific Garbage Patch (that disturbing plastic party in the ocean) after you throw it away. 

snack time

You’re at work and feel the hanger coming on, so you reach for that bag of nuts that’s always inexplicably in your desk's top drawer. The nuts came from California, but you’re in Minnesota. How did those rascals get in Minnesota? A big truck brought them there, spewing nasty emissions into the atmosphere the whole way. 

lunch

You packed your lunch today, so you’re feeling pretty good. But not so fast - you forgot the fork. You grab a plastic cafeteria fork and dive into your rando kind-of-good salad. 

The fork is plastic; you bought the salad’s spinach in a plastic bag; the cherry tomatoes were in that carton you forgot to recycle and the dressing came in one of those plastic dressing bottles. You know the ones. Mo plastic, mo problems. 

dinner

You’re grilling out tonight because it’s summer and you’re an adult. You get that juicy steak from the fridge, which came from a sad cow in Nebraska who poops a lot. Ick. You season it just right and serve it with some pesticide-tickled asparagus on the side. Bon appetit.

So today you’ve bombarded the atmosphere with a bunch of greenhouse gasses, eaten stuff from really far away and shoved a whole lot of food waste and plastic into the garbage. 

And this is just one day.

It’s reeeeally easy to be this person, but sustainability is basically not being this person. That’s where I come in. I can help you get there with seasonal recipes, grocery tips, gardening hacks, compost counseling, recycling 101 and so much more. Stay tuned for eco foodie posts every Sunday and Wednesday. I’ve got your back and the planet’s back too.