Sustainable Food Choices

With many smart people turning to a plant-based diet and the growing trend of celebrating local and organic food choices, it is clear that there is unprecedented awareness of the environmental and ethical issues around food production. The sustainability of our food systems is dependent on so many factors, including farming methods and waste during the production phases, long before it reaches our homes. 

While plant-based, local, organic food might be a great choice for the environment – reducing the demand for meat and dairy, both of which are very heavy on resources during production – not everybody wants to be vegan, and it requires supplementation and education to sustain a vegan diet from a health perspective. Even the value of local and organic foods has been called into question. For example, Swedish researchers found that it is much better, in terms of fossil fuel use, to import seasonal tomatoes from Spain (where they grow and ripen in natural sunlight) than to grow them in greenhouses in Sweden.  Many societies, especially in the northern hemisphere, would have extremely restricted diets if they were forced to eat only what would grow close by. Organic foods might have the advantage of being slightly higher in nutrients and creating healthier ecosystems, but they are often more expensive, and the benefit to human health of just eating enough vegetables – even conventional ones – outweighs the need to eat organic, if cost is the issue. It is important to balance our need for good nutrition with food choices that are better for our planet, but this can seem like a daunting task.

The UK’s Global Food Security programme [http://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/] is working hard to find that balance. They aim “to meet the challenge of providing the world’s growing population with a sustainable, secure supply of safe, nutritious, and affordable high-quality food using less land, with lower inputs, and in the context of global climate change, other environmental changes and declining resources.”

They have put together a list of sustainable eating strategies that look practical, as well as nutritious:

• Eat a varied balanced diet to maintain a healthy body weight. 
• Eat more plant-based foods, including at least 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day. 
• Value your food. Ask about where it comes from and how it is produced. Don’t waste it. 
• Choose fish sourced from sustainable stocks, taking seasonality and capture methods into consideration [In South Africa, we have SASSI to help us make these choices: http://wwfsassi.co.za/sassi-list]
• Moderate your meat consumption, and enjoy more peas, beans and pulses, tofu, nuts, and other plant sources of protein. 
• Include milk and dairy products in your diet and/or seek out plant-based alternatives, including those that are fortified with additional vitamins and minerals. 
• Drink tap water. 
• Eat fewer foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt. 

Sustainable eating is therefore not just about being vegan, but about making better food choices and possibly eating a bit less meat and dairy, provided you can find reasonable, healthy alternatives, of which there are many. It is also more complex than simply avoiding animal products. It is equally important to reduce our consumption of excessively processed or overly packaged foods (bottled water, for example), to reduce food waste in our homes, and to consider our health. In order to live long, healthy, productive lives, we still need to eat a variety of nutritious food and it is sometimes a struggle to get the balance right between doing the best for ourselves physically and maintaining the health of our planet. The more we understand all aspects of food, the easier this will get.