Eat in Season
Eating in season not only reduces environmental impact of refrigeration and transportation, but also provides a tasteful and nutritional alternative to processed foods.
The transportation used to move food accounts for over 6% of the pollution generated by the food enterprise. A simple and straightforward approach to reducing transport is through eating in season. Eating in season is defined as consuming food when it is at its climax in terms of flavor and quality. Not only does eating locally provide tasteful benefits, but it also supports the climate by limiting refrigeration and transportation. If everyone in developed countries ate in the season just once a week, it would save the world approximately 98 million tons of carbon a year. Food bought out of season must be refrigerated for months or shipped thousands of miles. What problems can this cause? Well, we use ten times as much energy into making our food than we gain from eating it. For instance, cod fished in Norway will go to China, filleted, and then return to Norway for sale, leading to tones (get it!?!) of pollution along the way. How can you help?
By going to farmer’s markets and researching which foods are in season, you will diversify your diet and eat meals that taste the best and are more nutritional. Avoiding packaged and processed food or food originating from overseas is a simplistic way to eat in season. Through these choices, the food you eat is grown closer to home and will avoid the unnecessary transport that occurs when eating out of season. Landfills fill at a rate of roughly 22,000 tons a day from single-use plastic we commonly use, such as chip bags to vacuum-sealed steak. Eating food with little packaging that is seasonally grown significantly reduces your carbon footprint and waste.
The consequences that we genuinely face due to the transportation of food are more pronounced than they may seem. Cars and trucks emit CO2, which traps sunlight in the atmosphere, warming the Earth. This effect is known as the greenhouse effect. Gases trapped in the atmosphere are responsible for global warming, which causes the melting of glaciers, severe weather, and rising sea levels. These effects will have long-lasting devastating effects on our planet, along with all species on Earth, which includes humans. The Los Angeles Times 2019 stated that “We’re not acting anywhere nearly quickly enough to stave off climate change that is already happening today. The North Pole is melting in summer. The Great Barrier Reef is dying — these changes are happening now, as we blindly carry on churning out carbon dioxide as if nothing is going on.” One of those countless actions we blindly are taking includes purchasing food from halfway across the world.
These common foods are shipped hundreds to thousands of miles:
Our food is now shipped across the world because of advances in globalization and trade. Globalization has helped us move things around the globe in a way that we can get our online orders in two days. It has sped up how people transport goods but has also quickened the warming of our only planet. With globalization, foods such as tomatoes are grown in places that are not where they most efficiently grow. Food corporations use artificial versions of nutriants found in natural tomato regions. Often they are artificially ripened ethylene gas, among others. Unfortunately, because of the lower price tag, it is cheaper for the food industry even though they do not bear the shipping costs upfront. Instead, the environment’s health is devastated in the process.
We must make the conscious decision to eat food grown in the season for the delightful flavor and reduction of emissions. It’s quite simple to accomplish this goal - we must research what foods are in season and routinely eat them. Not only will this help the environment, but it will also help your nutrition by having a balanced diet bringing light to our health.