Making a Meal of Things
When it comes to meal times, making the most eco-friendly food choice isn’t always easy!
You probably know that you can reduce your environmental impact by cutting down on your meat consumption, but have you thought about the fact that your favourite meat alternative might be harming the planet too? If you’re replacing meat with avocados or cows’ milk with almond milk, there’s a hidden environmental impact in the form of ‘food miles’.
What are food miles?
You might be wondering what food miles are. Tracking your food miles is all about checking how far your food has travelled to reach you, using up fossil fuels and producing lots of pollution in the process. If you’re eating lots of avocados, your food miles are probably pretty high, because they’re grown in the hot climates of places like South America. I’m not saying having steak for dinner every day is a better option, but food miles are part of the equation when it comes to making sustainable choices about your meals.
Can you make your plate more sustainable?
Part of the problem is that we need to change our eating habits and focus our meals on foods that are in season where we live. Here in the UK, we’re lucky that there are some fresh fruits and vegetables that we can eat throughout the winter, like root vegetables, leafy greens and fruits like oranges that grow indoors. Other foods, like strawberries or asparagus, only grow here in the summer months, when they’re definitely at their best in supermarkets! Cooking according to the season is a brilliant way to cut down your food miles and make your diet more diverse.
If you still want to eat certain fruits and vegetables out of season, there are plenty of low-energy ways of preserving foods! Methods of preservation like freezing, pickling or dehydrating foods are becoming popular with young people and are a brilliant way to reduce food waste. There are lots of great YouTube tutorials floating around online, but if it sounds like something you’d like to try, this from Sustainable Jungle is a great place to start.
It’s not hard to grow your own
Ultimately, the most environmentally friendly way to eat is to grow your own food. If you don’t have an outdoor space, it can be hard to find plants that work well, but even small changes make a difference over time!
Lots of plants are happy growing on windowsills, from radishes and baby beetroots to greens like pea shoots, kale and cress.
Some of the easiest and most useful things you can grow indoors are fresh herbs. In fact, things like basil are happiest inside, away from the cold UK winters. However, the pots of herbs you can buy from the supermarket are generally low-quality and come with lots of plastic packaging. Not only that, but they’re blooming expensive and don’t last long!
Don’t panic just yet – I’ve sourced the perfect alternative: my hydroponic herbs kit. Made from recycled wine bottles, they let you grow delicious herbs from scratch! I offer a variety of herbs, including basil, mint, oregano, parsley, coriander and tarragon.
As ever, improving our choices to live more sustainably is a gradual process. It’s all about making small changes to our everyday lives to protect the planet – there’s no need to make a meal of things!
Click here to shop my hydroponic herbs kit.
(Of course, opting for a vegan diet can seriously help your food ‘footprint’. Find some tips and ideas on how to do that here and here.)