Food must be sustainable for us AND for our planet

I am not a vegan or vegetarian, though I do not eat much meat. Sadly, the meat I do eat is highly processed, such as salami or bacon. At this point in my life I am trying to increase % of vegetables and whole grains in my diet, select healthy fish options more often and overall eat a little less per meal and a little more often. The biggest issues for me are ensuring I have time to cook, and  then dealing with leftovers intelligently. A constant struggle. But I am very interested in the current changes in the federal food recommendations.

Sustainability in our food guidelines

I’m catching up to this discussion a bit late in the game, and really hope you are all as interested as I am. The Feds re-vamp the food guidelines on a five-year cycle, and, in January, there was a recommendation for the new rendition (now “My Plate” instead of “The Food Pyramid”) to address climate related aspects of our food choices. This instigated a pretty quick lobbying push from meat producers, which is not surprising.

National Geographic article on some of the fallout

The recent reports indicate that the new food guidelines will NOT include the sustainability of food choices, which I find is a poor choice and a missed opportunity.

NPR report on food guidelines and sustainability

Many of the comments I’ve read talk about this being a food guide, and that the origins of the food and the embodied carbon in the process of raising food or processing food is a reach beyond the mandate. Others say that it will add confusion, and still others feel adding sustainability metrics into the guidelines will be a death knoll to USA farms raising beef and chicken.

I think we must and can include sustainability, for several reasons.

First, a bit of soft-pedaling. This is a guideline for diet and therefore does not apply universally or even equally to each and every person. How many people do you know that have seen ChooseMyPlate.gov? And I can’t get my family to eat vegetables even though we are all intelligent people. This guideline will touch some people and totally miss others and it should not be treated as universal. Just as the “got milk” campaign inadvertently sidelined genetic lactose intolerance this guideline will not properly guide people with specific allergies or illnesses. Yet, precisely because it is not a law or a mandate it MUST take the tone of “guide” seriously and guide us broadly in ways that are healthy to us as individuals and to us as communities sharing this planet.

Second, I don’t believe the intent is to directly label food types with sustainability metrics in the diet recommendations (or maybe I’m wrong on this) but more likely to say food choices have a relation to sustainability (well, duh). Any guidance for diet should also take into account or at least reference local growing seasons and yearly cycles of food availability as well as a simple understanding of the broad relative food-based caloric issues.

This could get controversial if we get overly detailed. If we say xxx calories of beef contains xx grams of fat and other nutrients while employing xxxxx calories of grain in production and growth of that cow over a number of years and then compare that to the lower energy intensity of eating the grain itself, then the guidance would be too heavy-handed. The guidance would be appropriate, however, if it were to focus on local and less processed as the key elements. This would be not only a guidance to consumers, but a fair market signal to food companies dealing with packaged and processed foods. We could maybe go so far as to illustrate that meats and fish could be considered more processed (in care and feeding and prepping for market) but we certainly don’t have to.

Third, and most importantly, because ANY GUIDELINE document in this day and age intended to assist people in intelligent decision making MUST include a reference to sustainability. This will sound harsh, but we need to stop being so ridiculous about this. We need to make sustainability front and center for every decision because, quite frankly, it is front and center for everything even though we are too scared to admit it.

Thanks for reading! I appreciate your comments.

Be greener,

Jodi

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