In Canada, consumers spend over $1.6 trillion each year on their purchases. In all of North America, we spend $26.4 trillion per year. That’s a pretty big economy! And to help you(th) navigate it, I’ve put together a short guide and set of resources. This is a three-part series featuring 7 areas of consumerism (read Part I!), with Part II focusing on the consumption of food.
Organics & Local
The big debate eco-enthusiasts have on sustainable food choices is whether organic food is better, or local food. Personally, I recommend trying to find equilibrium between both: here are some suggestions for accomplishing that, ranked from best to worst.
Search your local area for a small, family-run farm and strike up a relationship. It’s a win-win scenario: you can see every step of the process your food goes through (furthermore, small farms are often organic, or at the very least, less pesticide-intensive than factory farms). As for the farm, they acquire a regular customer and no longer need to worry as much about their revenues. You can start by looking into farmer networks like the Canadian Organic Growers.
- Buy from a local Farmer’s Market or specialty food stores like Planet Organic.
- Buy seasonal foods: in Western Canada, almost no fruits are growing during winter months, so often what happens is that stores increase their imports from locations like California and Florida. Cut back on your purchases of unseasonal foods.
- At supermarkets, look into items’ brands and locations and see which ones have traveled the least to arrive to you. Buy those over other brands if possible, as well as foods labeled as organic. But watch out for greenwashing!
- Try to cook your meals from scratch as much as possible– doing that work yourself will avoid the industrial creation of prepackaged foods, which will reduce the food’s ecological footprint tremendously.
Term of the Day: food miles. This is a measure of the distance your food travels, which also takes into account the means of travel – for instance, the efficiency of airplane shipping vs. container ship shipping.
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The Dirty Dozen
Organic food was mentioned earlier; this section is a subset of that category. The Dirty Dozen is a list released by the Environmental Working Group that shows the 12 fruits/vegetables which are the most important to buy organic – these get sprayed the most with pesticides out of all the crops we farm. In other words, if you buy these as inorganic products, you’ll be ingesting many more pesticides than if you chose to eat other plants inorganic instead.
EWG also releases the Clean 15, which as the name suggests, is the total opposite of the Dirty Dozen: the Clean 15 are the fruits/vegetables for which you need to worry about pesticides the least.
Finally, EWG also ranks plants in a different format: EWG’s Full List contains 53 plants, ranked from worst (having the most pesticides) to best (having the least pesticides).
If you don’t want to spend the money to buy all of your flora organic – which is probably wise, considering the cost – than don’t worry about items on the Clean 15, but do buy organic if plants are listed on the Dirty Dozen.
If you doubt the accuracy of the EWG’s rankings, see their Methodology.
In addition to the EWG online resources, you can also download their Guide in PDF format.
