Every Saturday morning I wake up to a “Weekly Kitchen Digest” email, which is an update of what fresh produce my house of 50 will be enjoying for the week. Sent by the student kitchen managers at Synergy, a cooperative house, these emails tend to tickle my imagination with opportunities for the next week of chopping, steaming, sautéing and eating. This past Saturday, the list featured co-op staples like kale and carrots, wintertime citrus treats, a few Fuji apples that have likely been in cold storage since fall and an array of produce items that, though they tingled my taste buds, left me wary about their origins.
I love bananas and strawberries like no other, and I have been known to eat whole cartons of blueberries in one sitting. But sadly, my inner local foodie knows that even if it feels like summertime outside, these fruits have traveled many miles to reach my mouth in the dead of winter.
For example, this week’s bananas are organic fruits sourced from Mexico and Central America. On the one hand, their fair trade certification gives me some reassurance that the plantation workers who helped grow these fruits were not mistreated in the production process. Still, each banana emits, on average, 80 grams of CO2 due to travel costs and the fossil fuels invested in production. These conflicting tidbits of information — garnered from classes at Stanford, a fixation on food politics and an obsession with environmental justice — can make choosing what to eat a rather complicated process.
Every time I decide what to fix myself for lunch, I am confronted by a series of similar dilemmas. For instance, the strawberries this week are from Natural Choice Foods, which means they’re certified organic berries from Oxnard, Calif. Though they’ve traveled a shorter distance than the bananas, and the company doesn’t use the pesticides associated with conventional berry production, the strawberry industry still has a record of labor and safety concerns. And what does the company mean by “natural” foods? Do I want to assume the “organic” label meets my personal standards for sustainable food?
I simply do not have the time or the resources to answer each of these questions before every meal.
Sometimes it seems like the more I learn about food, the less I feel qualified to make educated decisions about what I’m choosing to eat. But even if my knowledge of the environmental, health and social-justice implications of food can be overwhelming, I still believe that an informed decision is much better than an uninformed one. In order to facilitate decision-making in complex, interdisciplinary systems with limited information, we need a set of basic guidelines within which to operate.
Begin by considering what qualities of food matter the most to you. Being indecisive, I still try to seek out foods with positive environmental, health and social-justice implications. Though there are many problems associated with the organic label, it provides me with an easy way of guaranteeing that certain basic environmental and labor concerns are being addressed.
Next, allow yourself some wiggle room, because you can’t always be perfect. My eating behaviors have changed drastically since the days when my doctor-mother and nurse-father dubbed me the “carnivorous queen” of the family. Now I try to build 70 to 80 percent of my diet around locally sourced vegetarian meals, ideally based from whole food ingredients (bulk grains like quinoa and brown rice, dried beans, fresh produce). This gives me the flexibility to munch on frozen blueberries, splurge on chocolate peanut butter ice cream and eat locally sourced meat on occasion.
Finally, accept that your food choices will probably differ from those of others. I know that my diet is not the “best” or “right” one. Some of my friends urge me to consider veganism, while others espouse the health benefits of protein-rich, lean meats. One friend can hardly let a week pass without tomatoes, even if all he can find in February are, understandably, flavorless, rusty-colored rocks flown in from Latin America. For the most part, I respect each of my friends’ food choices. I don’t necessarily agree with them, but I am proud that they are at least making informed decisions about their meals.
It can be draining to contemplate the broad-ranging implications of every food we eat, but it is important to consider the environmental, health and social-justice ramifications of our eating behaviors. I’m not advocating decision fatigue over whether you should reach for the strawberries or the tangerines, but it is important to reflect on the fact that what we choose to eat every day has implications that stretch far beyond our individual waistlines.
Think you can teach the carnivorous queen a thing or two about food choices? Let Jenny know your suggestions by emailing her at jrempel “at” stanford “dot” edu.