One of the Biggest Potentials for Positive Change

Reviewing your family's eating habits and making some adjustments is one area of domestic life where you can end up with a huge win-win. Not only is industrial food production and processing one of the biggest polluters and energy hogs on Earth, but it also tends to fill you and your family members with “food product” touted as nutritious and delicious that is, upon closer examination, neither of the above and in many cases actually unhealthy, even dangerous. Processed foods, especially those known as “junk food or fast food,” are engineered primarily to be easy to manage and sell in large quantities at the best possible profit. Nutrition is clearly not the first priority in these foods, nor is responsible production or environmental care.

By taking a look at your weekly menus and shopping lists and making some simple changes, you can significantly improve the health of your family while reducing your contribution to carbon and pollution output.

The basic principles are not difficult to understand or adopt. In his book, Food Matters, Mark Bittman does a great job of expressing how to eat healthier and more responsibly. The essence of his message is to eat more plants and fewer animal products. That’s it. No extreme deprivation or absolutely rigid rules. He expands on that concept to provide helpful guidelines for making changes. Try to buy foods that list only five ingredients or fewer, and that list ingredients with names you recognize or are fewer then three or four syllables. He credits Michael Pollan, one of the smartest, most articulate writers alive, with this rule of thumb. Also look for foods that are produced within two hundred miles or so of where you live. Don’t expect to hit it 100% of the time, but by keeping these goals in the forefront of your mind, you’ll be on the way to improving your weekly diet.