SO for the first segment of our Indian Summer, we are concentrating on, you might have guessed it, FOOD!
And if you've asked yourself why are these crazy girls concentrating on only eating local food, well hey you are in the right place to find out!
1. It's just better for the earth. It's the right thing to do to make everyone happy and healthy. SO much oil, water, and other fossil fuels and resources (including food) are wasted in the production of food.
example: for 16 lbs of grain and soy fed to beef cattle, we only get 1 lb of meat on our plates (the grain has 21x more calories, and 8x more protein, but only 3x more fat than the 1 lb)
2. So much is wasted in the production of food when there are people starving everywhere.
"One billion people in the world are chronically hungry and one billion are overweight. "
3. Fresh food uses less water.
example: the ratio of water to produce 1 pound of protein from the food source from fresh to processed food in
corn to canned corn 1/390mgs
hamburger to hotdog 60/880mgs
rice to minute rice 1/700 mgs
4. HEALTH "So many of our most dreaded diseases are related to the 'food' we now eat--the good news- we can reduce our chances of getting these diseases [obesity, cancer from antibiotics, heart disease, hyper-tension] when we control what we eat."
5. The definition of food has changed in our society. Now children answer that food comes from a box or a store. Some cannot identify vegetables in their natural shape. Do not realize they come from the ground.
6. We are constantly consuming hidden sugars, instead of eating more raw and local food.
7. "Whenever you eat what might be called inefficient food [ex. beef], you're consuming more of the planet's energy than you need to live well."
example: "Eating a typical family-of-four steak dinner is the rough equivalent, energy wise, of driving around in an SUV for three hours while leaving all the lights on at home."
-free-range, humanely raised beef is important (for ethical, environmental, and health reasons), but we need to consume less meat in general. "Eat less meat, but eat better meat."
Stay tuned for tips on what YOU can do to make a difference (specifically in Charlottesville), and reflections on our personal experiences.
Ya'll are awesome! This blog is informative and it really shows how committed you are to this idea. I love the pics of food and the pics from the party. Sorry I couldn't be there :( Just out of intellectual curiosity, where are you getting most of your facts and quotations from? Also, as someone unfamiliar with this topic, what is a more in depth definition of the term "inefficient foods."
ReplyDeleteSome other thoughts I had a about HEALTH Food choices have a LARGE impact on Type II Diabetes and are a major contributor to Type II running out of control in the US.
- Elizabeth
Thanks, Elizabeth, for the comments and questions! We missed you Tuesday night, but there will be more events to come! No worries.
ReplyDeleteWe've gotten a lot of information from Diet for a Small Planet, and Food Matters, which you can check out on our bookshelf. They're both great books, and not hard reads at all.
"Inefficient food" is food that loses a lot of nutritional value from its journey from raw material to what you get on your plate. For example, we tend to feed cows processed corn and sometimes meat, put antibiotics in them, etc. So that's a lot of resources put into a steak or hamburger, and you lose so much energy at each level. One crazy example (we got this from Food Matters)-"The beef in one Big Mac is equivalent - in terms of grain produced and consumed - to five loaves of bread." Generally, we would say 5 loaves of bread > one Big Mac. That's inefficient food.
And that's a great point about diabetes! It is a huge problem that can so easily be prevented.