This month’s challenge: Changing our food habits
Friday, May 23, 2008
(image from jbloom via flickr)
According to the USDA, up to 40% of the food bought in America is thrown out instead of eaten. With food being the #3 item in most households’ expenses (behind housing and transportation), this amounts to an incredible waste of time (in shopping and preparation) and money (spent on purchasing, transport, and refrigeration).
This doesn’t even take into account the environmental havoc of food waste. When food is trashed, so is the packaging it came in, as well as all the resources that went into producing and transporting it to the end consumer. And when millions go to bed hungry each night, squandering so much just seems wrong. Second Harvest, the food bank network, estimates that if we recovered even 5% of the food wasted each year, that would be enough to feed 14 million people.
There’s also the fact that, when we eat out, we tend to splurge more. Anyone who’s ever worked in a restaurant knows that the way they make everything taste so good is by adding approximately a pound of butter to every serving. I certainly don’t have anything against butter (quite the contrary!) but it’s good to know what’s in your food so you don’t get too out of hand. I know that when I eat out, it often comes from a place of “Oh, I’m tired, I deserve a treat,” and even if there is a salad on the menu, the french fries are more likely to get my vote.
So ... this month’s challenge is to look at our behaviors around food—wasting it, eating too much of it, buying it unconsciously—and turn them around. Most of us have some destructive food habits ... maybe you mean to shop at the farmers’ market for local organic produce, but you end up at the grocery store buying plastic wrapped boxes of stuff from God knows where. Or maybe you keep meaning to start your compost pile, but you never quite get around to it. Or perhaps, like me, you lazily succumb to the siren song of delivered pizza when you have perfectly good veggies and leftovers languishing in your fridge.
I’m hoping that with a little group support, we can conquer these bad habits and replace them with healthier ones. My goals are to
- get composting started at home
- get a few veggies growing in my backyard, and
- most importantly, resist take-out and all the attendant packaging in favor of preparing healthy and yummy meals at home.
This last one is going to be rough for me—I live alone, and as Stella pointed out in an earlier comment, it’s sometimes difficult to get motivated to cook a meal and clean up after it when it’s just me. Also, my neighborhood has literally hundreds of amazing restaurants, almost all of which deliver! But it’s something I need to do. Especially since, most of the delivery food I get comes in plastic containers that can’t be recycled as part of New York City’s curbside pickup program.
Also, why on Earth would I want to spend $6 on a cup of lentil soup from Pret a Manger, delicious as it is, when I can make a huge pot of it at home for less than half that cost?
So ... my first steps this weekend are to get some veggies in the soil, make a meal plan, and do my shopping for the week at the farmers’ market and the Park Slope Food Co-op.
What are some food behaviors you’d like to tackle this month?
Food is one of those areas I am pretty good at, but I still have room for improvement.
Here’s what I do well:
-Menu Planning
-Cooking and baking from scratch
-Using produce up before it goes bad
-Pantry management
-Cooking instead of going out
-Buying organic and/or local and/or fair trade whenever possible
-Composting
-Eating well for a small amount of money (not so much environmentalist, but a good thing anyway)
-I make only what I think we will eat in a single meal for most things. There are only a few kinds of foods we actually like as leftover. Soup is fine, for example, but many things are just limp and lifeless the next day.
Here’s what I could improve on:
-I need to use up the stuff I froze last year. I have some random odds and ends like pea shoots and red currants. I think I’m going to try making my spinach dip with peashoots. Zach will eat anything having to do with spinach dip. I’ll probably make some sort of red currant sauce too.
-Entertaining at home. I tend to get together with people at restaurants or coffee shops because I don’t like cleaning up for company. I need to get over myself. My friends don’t care if there are toys in the living room.
-Growing more of my own food. Obviously, this is where my community garden plot comes in.
Fist of all, we do have poor habits because we have become accustomed to buying cheap food and having limitless choice of food in the market place. I remember when I worked at a farm one season and we grew lettuce, I could not believe how much attention, watering, weeding and coddling that lettuce took to grow. The farmer remarked that lettuce is a luxurious crop—its mostly water, contains very few nutrients and is a favorite of wandering fauna, But she said she grew it because its what people want. I vowed after that experience never to waste another head or bag of lettuce. I have though, oops, as other priorities take center stage, but lately I have done well at good lettuce turnover in my fridge.
I am going to take Stella’s cue and list the areas that I do well in overall, and then list my challenges:
Doing well at:
packing healthy lunches
eating veggies in fridge
drinking from reuseable glass water bottle
composting
I pack a healthy lunch 4 times/week. here’s what I do: I like to take 20-25 minutes making a healthy lunch the night before, I view my lunch making session as a much desired break from lesson plans, grading at night. I use plastic containers to contain my lunch, which I NEVER microwave. I usually make a sanwich with lots of lettuce on it, a salad sometimes, and a large container of sliced fruits and veggies, like grapefruit, oranges, carrots and cucumber sticks, whatever, even sliced apple sqeezed with lemon juice. I like precutting everything, so I can compost all the peelings right away. It’s been working out well, and I nearly always get my daily veg and fruit servings. Since I work in a school, I don’t have time to leave during the day for lunch, so I have to bag my own or I won’t eat.
other tips:
Keep some staples at work if you have the space:
extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper
favorite tea
nuts, dried fruits
apples
carrots—no mini carrots(nutrients are stripped from skin and they create a lot of food processing waste)
high quality fair trade chocolate
Drink tea and snack on nuts and fruit to keep calories down. I have found that by keeping to my homemade luches, i lost about 9 pounds simply by eating my daily veggies/ fruits. Dark choclate is perfectly healthy and a great treat.
Improving on:
Addressed within the next week
refining what I buy when I shop
spending time in my garden, growing veggies
inventory of dry goods I aleady have- using or getting rid of
using frozen items—strawberries, soup
Sometimes I take a moment before I put an item in my basket and I make a projection—Why am I buying this? Do I really plan to use this within the next week? Be Honest? No… O.k. and I reluctantly leave it on the shelf, reminded that I am an adult and I have to make tough choices (lol). This works well, But I want to improve on this.
transplanting seedlings that are big enough, directly seeding some greens, weeding, garden work, specially pay attetion to growing lettuce to save $, packaging, and get good experience growing it in home garden
make strawberry jam with frozen berries, give away some soup, eat some.
make blackbean soup with dry beans, make something using smoked paprika as ingredient, make list of what you could make with dry goods that are not past their prime, since original intended recipe is long forgotten
Hello, you are all pointing to something important I think - that the relationship to food is often more emotional than anything else (the sense to deserve something you mention, etc) and I can see my principles flip to their opposite in a second when I am letting myself go hungry enough.
On the plus side: I have managed to kick quite a chocolate/ ice cream addiction by what’s apparently called ‘crowding out’: getting myself enough raw (and delicious) juice (including the pulp, of course)or sprouted grain and seeds breakfasts, that the cravings are beginning to subside. Plus I make sure I do not go to the store hungry. And the more raw I eat (I never actually expected nor intended this) the less bread and dairy I crave - seriously. It seems that all the enzymes and vitamins etc. are what I was really craving. And I am satisfied with less. I am quite excited about that.
What I do want to change: reduce the amount of glass or plastic containers and wrapping the food I buy comes in - it makes up about 70% of my garbage. Even though it’s recycled, that seems way too much. And to speak and exchange more with others, to not make this topic a private personal thing. On Friday, a friend is coming to try out my raw breakfast I have been raving about: Blueberries, sprouted buckwheat and sunflower seeds, flax seed and homemmade almond milk. Let’s see what he thinks..
Here I am joining in late after a few days off from the internet. ;)
I love this topic and the response it got. Food is important to us in so many ways and we all have very definite ideas about it. It also happens to be a big challenge to change your food habits. We are habitual about how we eat and it feels like have to relearn walking or speech almost in the enormity of the job when we try to make big changes in our shopping, menu planning, cooking, and eating.
But the more we share our ideas about it and mull over other peoples comments the more we are enriched! And… the more we can make changes.
There are many areas that I have been slacking on and/or want to improve on. For example, I haven’t hand kneeded a “from scratch” loaf of bread in I couldn’t tell you how long and I used to be very good about really getting down to basics with bread for my family.
There are also things I am very good about. Our whole family cooks. None of us is in the category of people who can’t seem to boil water to make instant noodles. We are teaching the kids and have been from a young age, to have a realistic sense of where food comes from and to not get out of touch with the land. We tend to splurge a little on chocolate, although not terribly often since we want to avoid artificial flavors and colors where we can and candy is one place that you have to work hard to avoid them. It seems like a good thing to me that we don’t eat a lot of candy and when we do, it is of a far better quality than 99% of the candy you see in the stores.
I could go on forever on this topic, but I’ll just say to everyone who browses these comments: You can cook food that you’ll be happy to eat at home!
Great challenge, great responses so far. Been wanting to jump in and comment for a couple of days, and now I finally have time.
I’m good at:
- Composting. (Been doing this for almost ten years, the soil in my garden used to be rock hard clay, it’s now crumbly and rich)
- Growing my own fruit & veg. (Again, been doing this for a while. I love when the seed catalogs arrive each year and I can select another batch of bizarre heirloom seeds to grow)
- Packing lunches. (Thanks, Mr. Bento!)
I’m bad at:
- Waste. I throw too much food away. (Curse Costco and their jumbo vats of produce)
- Using food that I’ve frozen. (Stuff tends to languish in the freezer ‘til it’s so freezer burned that it’s no longer edible)
Cutting down on waste is going to be my major focus for this challenge. Instead of buying produce in bulk, I’m going to try and buy only enough for the next few meals. This should reduce the amount of time I have to spend hoisting rotting broccoli etc. out of the fridge with tongs. Luckily I work close by the ‘food district’ in Pittsburgh, and I go walking there every lunchtime, so even though I’m shopping for food more frequently, I’ll actually use less gas. Result!
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