3 Tips to Increase Your Diet's Environmental Sustainability

Is your diet environmentally sustainable? If not, these 3 tips will help you move toward an environmentally sustainable diet.

Tip #1: When Possible, Buy Local

When you buy locally produced foods, you eliminate the transportation cost associated with transporting the foods that comprise your diet long distances. "Food miles" is a concept that roughly estimates the distance your food travels from farm to table. A "foodshed" is analogous to a watershed, only it delimits the area supplying food for a given location.

How far your food moves and how it travels has dramatic impact on its sustainability. Airplanes require the equivalent of 165 gallons of gas per ton of food moved per food mile, while trucks use 30 gallons and trains 7 gallons of gas per ton per food mile. Even reducing energy associated with transportation does not reduce the much larger consumption of fossil fuels associated with cultivation, harvesting, shopping, storage, and cooking.

According to the USDA, the average amount of food available per person per year (includes spoilage) is just short of a ton (1,950 pounds of 2003.) By buying its diet ingredients locally, even a single family can reduce its carbon footprint substantially.

Tip #2: Avoid or Minimize Meat Products, Especially Beef

Americans are not only eating a bigger diet every year, their meat consumption is the highest it's ever been - 57 more pounds per person per year than 60 years ago. As affluence levels rise, meat consumption rises.

As of 2000, Americans were eating a startling 57 more pounds of meat per person annually than in the late 1950s, according to the USDA. The total consumed? One hundred ninety five pounds per person per year in 2000, and another 5 pounds higher by 2007.

The production of meat , particularly beef, is notorious for its inefficiency and its excessive creative of greenhouse gases. Livestock farming produces more greenhouse gases than cars do!

A vegetarian diet, or even a substantial cutback in meat, will make your food choices more sustainable.

Tip #3: Prepare and Serve Mostly Room Temperature Meals

Ten percent of U.S. energy use is linked to diet. The biggest component of diet-related energy use, about one-third, is attributable to storage and cooking once the food is in homes.

Extrapolating from the country's total energy use of 90 quadillion BTUs per annum, home food storage and cooking consumes 9 quadrillion BTUs of energy each year.

The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy recommends eating less foods that require refrigeration or freezing to reduce your carbon footprint. This will enable you to use a smaller refrigerator/freezer, saving even more energy.

For cooked foods, IATP suggests choosing energy efficient cooking methods and reducing reducing energy waste by cooking multiple dishes at once. You can also re-design your diet around meal choices that require less or no cooking.