Environmental eating
I had this crazy idea to start up a new website today, specifically a wiki.
Jasna’s vegetarian and I’m semi-vegetarian (“flexitarian”, Wikipedia informs me), only because I’m a picky eater and the vegetarian options outside of what we prepare at home often aren’t great.
Environmental reasons are certainly the primary reasons for both of us. Meat is inherently inefficient: for most animals humans eat, it takes somewhere around 10 Calories of plant matter to make 1 Calorie of animal matter and it would make a lot of sense environmentally — and probably economically as well — to cut out the middle man and just eat the 10 Calories of plant matter. That inefficiency leads to increase land usage, water usage, soil erosion, etc. There are other environmental problems, such as sewage and methane emissions.
Well today I was lamenting to myself that there really is no resource for finding out exactly what the environmental costs of foods are! To be sure, drawing the line at meat is a little arbitrary. Vegetarian food, especially meat alternatives like TVP, can go through a lot of processing and, for all I know in my ignorance, end up being just as bad as meat. On the other side, for all I know, also in my ignorance, there are some meats out there that really aren’t a big problem at all.
So I have a vision: what if there were a wiki that allowed consolidating information and maybe even original research into what the environmental costs of foods are?
I don’t know if it’s practical at all. To gauge interest I did my best at asking an unbiased survey while keeping an eye on the “Environmental damage from husbandry” option. My biggest fear is I’d just be creating a website for myself that no one else will ever read; I already have one of those.
The closest thing I’ve found to what I’m looking for is foodorigins but it’s not really aiming at the same thing.
I don’t know. I’ll mull it over for a while longer. At stake is $10 for a domain registration and however long it takes to set up a wiki these days.
I’d really like to have something like that. Personally another thing I’d be looking for information like foodorigins (although foodorigins doesn’t have many cities in it), along with specific information on food production companies.
Also, when I buy product X from company Y, what does that organic label really mean? What exactly does “spices” entail anyway?
And yeah, then after figuring out which products to buy, or not to buy, it’s hard to know where to buy the best foods, and during what time of year (some markets are only open in the summer, etc).
Basically I’d love to see a site where you type in a specific food item available at the grocery store, and you can bring up its info: what environmental impact it has, a link to the food producer and some info about the company and what type of impact it has based on all of its products, and any known info about the company and its parent company or subsidiaries.
Maybe even a list of the product ingredients where each ingredient has a page that contains some concise info or links to research on health info for that ingredient. Is Xantham gum bad? Most of the time I don’t want to read a wikipedia page while I’m at the grocery store, I just want to know: yes, no, or we’re not sure, you decide.
Anyway… to any part of the above, I say wholeheartedly, YES. The world needs something like that. Food producers need more accountability and in my opinion the only way to take the power back is to utilize the internets.