Sustainable Eating

Who knew that food has a pretty bad environmental impact! (From www.weact.ethz.ch)

Last week, with a group of friends I signed up to do this one month of living, eating, and travelling sustainably. Admittedly, it's pretty embarrassing that I've only started this now, considering now that every day I write, research and learn about the economics of renewable energy, reducing carbon emissions, and putting the brakes on excessive consumption. It's probably time to walk the talk a bit :) 


It's pretty common knowledge biggest energy-intensive/carbon-emitter culprits are the electricity generation and transport sectors. But since demand of products/services in these sectors is derived from the final output, it turns out that the food industry has been pretty naughty contributing to 31% of total anthropogenic (a fancy word for human-driven) emissions. If you think of how much energy is used to convert that happy little cow in the paddock to into the chunk of steak in your gob, it all adds up: the farming, land use, transporting, cooling, lots and lots of wrapping and packaging, more cooling at the supermarket, and finally cooking. 


So I figured I'd give sustainable eating a go and see how I can reduce the negative impact of cooking, without entirely giving up my dream of one day being a Nigella! Going fully organic, especially in Switzerland where labour cost is exorbitant, can be pre-ttttty expensive and would definitely make a massive dent on our student budget. So here's just a few simple things that I want to commit to:

• Eating from locally sourced, seasonal produce, and start shopping at my local farmers markets. Hopefully this will improve my grocery shopping German conversation from "No I don't have a discount card, I don't want free scratchies or the receipt!" to actually having a proper conversation with the sellers and be at least conversant...
• Eat less read meats and more fish and poultry
• Eat less meats in general and more veggies (my mum would be so happy...)
• Try to subsitute exotic spices which have to be flown from the fields of West Java, with locally available spices in Europe, and not alter the taste too much. Surely, this is how an east-west fusion food can be born! 
• Reduce cooking time when possible to reduce the kitchen electricity consumption.

At the markets... like a kid in a candy store

There are heaps of blogs and websites online that talk about sustainable eating, so will be definitely checking them out. This should be interesting!