Unless you've been living under a rock for the last three weeks, you've seen the news about the oil rig explosion and leak in the Gulf of Mexico. 200,000 gallons of oil going into the ocean on a daily basis. That's 139 gallons a minute. I'm absolutely heartsick over this, and it's given me new reasons to work on eating better.
Originally, my reasoning for doing this was all about our health and welfare. Eating organically keeps pesticides out of our bodies and eating whole foods and more fruits and vegetables is just better for us. What I've found along the way is that eating this way has even bigger implications.
Nothing has brought this home more than the environmental disaster. The way Americans eat, our Standard American Diet, is hugely reliant on fossil fuels. Petroleum is needed to till the land, plant the seeds, harvest the crops, and transport it to sale. Then you have the fuels that go into processing and even more to transport to the store. Same for meats. The cows are born and raised to a certain age in one place and then transported to another to be slaughtered. The feed that helps raise them to full weight (corn) has to be brought to them. More fuels. The way we eat is making us more reliant on fossil fuels by the day!
Now, I get that unless you've growing veggies in your back yard, you're always going to be using fossil fuels. Eating organically and locally, though, helps to mitigate that. Ditto for eating seasonally. I've been doing better about the first two, but I need to learn more about seasonal eating.
Hopefully as this goes on, the media will help people think about all the things this oil is being used for in our everyday lives. I hate it that an environmental disaster is what it may take for people to wake up to this, but hopefully some good will come of it!
That said, I've been a little off the wagon this week. Between coming off the half, being sick, and J being out of town, I haven't done much cooking. Not much = once this week. I'm discovering that while all the changes I'm making are relatively small, I have to be really conscious about it and keep the focus on my eating. Next week, hopefully I'll be more able to do that.
I'm still just getting into "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle", but I have to say that it's yet another reminder of how dependent we are on transported food.
ReplyDeleteOh, yes! That whole book is steeped in the local vs. transported issue. I have to honestly say that I haven't paid as much attention to it as I should; eating local foods only right now feels like a bit too much of a mountain to climb and I'm not in mountain climbing-shape. I do want to be thinking about that this summer, though!
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