• Feb 15, 2023

    Use Less, Not Different

    There’s no question that we humans need to modify our consumption and energy use habits to be more environmentally friendly in a world being ravaged by climate change. The solution, we are told by companies, politicians, and partially informed loudspeakers, is that we need to change what we consume. Buy electric cars! Use energy generated from solar and wind instead of fossil fuels! Give your business to companies that have net-zero carbon usage! This way of thinking makes consumers believe that they are doing something good for the environment by buying something different, but the real path to reducing our impact on the environment is to use less altogether. The flaw in our collective thinking is that switching to “greener” options is itself going to solve our environmental problems. We choose to ignore that everything comes at a cost. Sure, switching to a new electric vehicle from your old gas-powered car may reduce your fossil fuel consumption and on-road emissions, breaking even at approximately four years of usage, but the electricity used to charge your vehicle and the resources needed to manufacture your batteries, chips, and solar panels still need to come from somewhere.

    The consumption of electronic products is increasing at such a breakneck pace that companies are rapidly racing to get approval to perform deep-sea mining for the metals required to manufacture batteries, but scientists are warning that there hasn’t been enough research done to determine the impacts on ocean ecosystems. Life at the bottom of the ocean has taken million of years to get to the point it is at, and deep-sea mining can quickly disrupt these ecosystems that would need several more millions of years to recover. We don’t even fully know what effects deep sea ecosystems have on global environmental health, but we do know that ocean health is very closely tied to managing warming in a healthy earth. Companies pushing to get regulatory approval to start mining without waiting for appropriate scientific research are willfully ignoring the impacts that their actions will likely have on the earth. We have already seen the above-ground impact that mining rare earth metals has had on the environment by salinating water, destroying ecosystems and habitats, and destroying potentially arable land by spraying acid during the mining process. The market for rare earth metals is incredibly strong because of the high usage of electronic products throughout the world, encouraging the development of illegal mines in places like the Amazon rainforest, where trees are cleared to make room for such mines, assisting in the depletion of the effectiveness of the Amazon rainforest as the world’s largest carbon sink.

    An increase in consumption of electronic products must be accompanied with an increase in chip manufacturing. Every time you buy a new phone or new computer, it’s easy to see the device in your hand and disregard the work it took for it to get there. Chip manufacturing is incredibly water-intensive and produces copious amounts of hazardous waste. A single one of Intel’s chip fabrication plants in Arizona produced “nearly 15,000 tons of waste in the first three months of [2021], about 60% of it hazardous [and] … consumed 927m gallons of fresh water … and used 561m kilowatt-hours of energy.” The world’s largest chip manufacturer, TSMC, uses 5% of the entire country of Taiwan’s electricity and continued to use excessive amounts of water in the midst of a drought, causing tensions with farmers who have to work to provide the population with food. And yet, we are constantly bombarded with advertisements to “trade in” your old phone for the newest model, or sign up for phone plans that will replace your phone with the newest model every year. Just because your phone looks clean and doesn’t have an exhaust pipe doesn’t mean that it isn’t the result of an extremely wasteful and environmentally damaging manufacturing process. It’s easy - and incredibly irresponsible - to ignore the impact that your daily consumption has on the earth. Farmers are already struggling to water their crops amid increasingly common droughts, and chip manufacturing expansion is only making their lives even harder. We are so disconnected from the sources of everything we consume - our food, our electronics, our clothes - that we don’t even register the implicit tradeoffs we make when choosing to get the newest phone, TV, or car. Everyone needs to eat, but you could probably live with an old phone (or even no phone at all!) so why are farmers the only ones fighting the battle for the water needed to grow the food that everyone eats?

    Greenwashing is a different, but not altogether unrelated issue. Companies nowadays are trying to increase their appeal to an audience that wants to be more environmentally friendly by saying that they have “net-zero emissions.” This often hinges on the carbon credit market, which allows people to sequester carbon and sell those credits to larger, polluting entities in a sort of zero-sum game that allows these companies to claim that they sequester as much carbon as they are outputting. We rely on questionable - and provably flawed - methods of calculating carbon offsets to allow largely polluting companies to get away with not actually reducing their emissions. The idea of carbon credits and carbon offsets is ultimately just another excuse to allow companies and individuals to continue their high-consumption, highly-polluting ways while claiming that they aren’t actually impacting the earth in a negative way. The right solution to work towards a healthier earth is to cut down consumption as well. It’s not a bad thing to implement projects to sequester carbon, but these should be in addition to - not instead of - cutting down emissions.

    People want to project their eco-friendliness by using the “greener” option, like switching out their gas-powered cars for electric vehicles, but that’s not nearly enough. This isn’t to say that oil wells and fracking are better options, but it is rather to show that there is a cost to everything. Just switching cars doesn’t get rid of all the effects that your consumption has, you actually have to choose to drive less and use alternatives as much as you can - take the train, ride a bike, carpool - in order to meaningfully reduce your impact on the earth. This extends to all forms of consumption - don’t buy more food than you need, don’t replace your electronics until you really need to, have a higher tolerance for aging products. Despite all that we have come to learn about our environment by this point, we are still choosing to make rash decisions to match with the inordinate demands of human consumption, deciding to “deal with it later” in a world where we can’t afford to do that anymore.

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  • Dec 24, 2022

    Do Better Ingredients Make Better Food?

    What makes food taste good? You most likely revisit your favorite restaurant because you love the taste of the food, but what makes the food from that restaurant taste better to you than the food from any other restaurant? To an extent, the skill of the chef and the combination of flavors are going to be the answer here. Every chef has different techniques and recipes that they’ve learned and perfected over the years that contribute to the unique taste of their dishes. But how about home cooking? I myself have cooked certain dishes multiple times that have tasted better on certain days over others. In this case, the chef is the same, the techniques are the same, and the environment is most likely the same as well. So what gives?

    Taste is surprisingly complex. What we experience as good or bad “taste” involves all five senses in the eating experience. A crisp potato chip is going to “taste” better than a soft or soggy one, even if the actual blind taste of the chip is technically identical. Good smelling foods “taste” better than ones that smell unappealing or suspicious. Different people also have varying preferences around specific foods and ingredients - for one thing, there’s evidence that children will like the foods that their mothers consumed while pregnant. While interesting in its own right, personal preference doesn’t really play a role in our exploration of what makes the same dish cooked by the same person taste better on one day versus another.

    One thing that has changed from time to time for me is the actual ingredients I use. Let’s take pasta, for example. I’ll typically make sauce from scratch by cooking down tomatoes. Usually I’ll buy these tomatoes from anyone who sells produce at the farmer’s market on the weekend. When I visit my family in the summer, though, my mom will give me bags of tomatoes grown on our farm to take back and I’ll use these tomatoes to make my sauce. The sauce made from our own farm-grown tomatoes inevitably tastes better than any other sauce I make, even though I use the same techniques to make all tomato sauces. When adding parmesan cheese on top of the pasta, the freshly grated cheese I buy from the international grocer near Port Authority adds an altogether better taste than the pre-packaged parmesan cheese from the grocery store. With the pasta, I had different ingredients that I could compare between versions of the same dish, but recently, I followed a recipe for cookies for the very first time and I had friends telling me that they were some of the best cookies they’ve ever had, and this really got me thinking. If I barely ever make cookies, what could have influenced the taste of these cookies? Because it certainly wasn’t my skill and experience. Maybe some good luck - although on that day I didn’t have much luck between burning myself in the oven and only realizing an hour before needing to leave the apartment that our new baking sheet was too big for our tiny oven. Anyway, the only thing I could think of that may have been different in my recipe from what most people would use was the butter - which is indeed a major ingredient in cookies: I used fresh sweet cream butter that I had bought at the farmer’s market. If this major ingredient was the reason for the better taste, it would explain why I’ve gotten similar comments from others about the aforementioned pasta I make with my mom’s tomatoes. Perhaps somewhat pseudoscientifically, this removes much of the bias that I might have had for our own farm-grown produce, since ingredient substitutions from sources other than our own farm have yielded better taste.

    In the case of the parmesan cheese, we can guess at some more straightforward reasons as to why the freshly grated, imported cheese tasted better - the aging process and lack of preservatives springing to top of mind. As for the butter or the tomatoes, the question is more complex. Why do these ingredients taste better? Could it be the nutrients in the soil that the tomatoes grow in or the grass that the cows eat? “Flavoromics” is still a growing and evolving approach to research in food science, and there are a lot of interesting questions to answer about what makes certain ingredients taste better, or if fresh and well-grown ingredients actually do taste better in blind taste tests. There is evidence that dairy products from grass-fed cows taste and smell different, for example, but not much research beyond that. It would be fascinating to know what exactly makes foods grown or developed in different ways taste better or worse. In the meantime, try making your favorite recipe using freshly-grown, organic, and well-raised alternatives to your standard ingredients and see if you can notice the difference in taste. If my experience in cooking is any indication, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

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  • Dec 11, 2022

    Slow Food

    People are obsessed with making things faster and more efficient. We want our wait times to be shorter, our loading times to be faster, and the time spent between productive tasks to be cut down to a minimum. Born out of this obsession was fast food, with a name so apt that there’s no questioning the reasons for its origin and success. Fast food offers the convenience of a cheap, pre-made meal that can be eaten quickly, on the go, and during or in between tasks, and these apparent benefits have led the global fast food market to be valued at over 641 billion USD in 2021 and it is projected to continue to grow. Unfortunately, there are some very not-so-hidden costs that have come with the explosion of fast food.

    The most obvious impact that fast food has had on people is in terms of physical health. Fast food is extremely calorie dense and designed to be addictive. A combination of sugar, fat, salt, and caffeine make people return again and again to fast food and eat more than they need. This combination of factors is also what contributes to the need to snack in between meals - salty, oily snacks like chips can be addictive in the same way that fast food is. It’s no surprise that at the time of a 2018 study, it was estimated that 71% of Americans were obese, on an increasing trend from the last referenced measurement 5 years prior.

    The idea that fast food and junk food aren’t good for your health is by no means a new one, so let’s move on to a different extreme - diets and food fads. Sometimes it feels like every third person you come across is talking about a fad diet they’re following or that every time you turn on the local news, the reporters are talking about the latest superfood. Clearly these people understand that fast food is not a good source of daily nutrition, but fad diets and obsession with calorie and specific nutrition content is not the healthiest (let alone most enjoyable) way to eat, either. This brings us to something called the “French Paradox”. The French are known to eat foods that are at least as - if not more - calorie-dense than those often eaten by Americans and, despite their higher consumption of saturated fats, the French have a lower average incidence of coronary heart disease than Americans. If following diets and counting calories were better than eating calorie-rich foods, then how do we explain this “French Paradox”?

    To answer this question, let’s talk about a movement that is being referred to as Slow Food. Psychologist Paul Rozin explains that the attitudes that French have towards food vary very much from those that Americans have. The French tend to enjoy and appreciate the experience of eating while Americans are more focused on the effects of eating. In France, the act of eating is one associated with pleasure and is savored, meaning that meals are eaten slowly, resulting in smaller portion sizes and less stress associated with the idea of eating. By contrast, higher percentages of Americans said that they would rather eat a nutrition pill than deal with the stress of figuring out what to eat and spending time eating. The Slow Food movement focuses on trying to cut back on the increasing grasp of the convenience and addictiveness of fast food and bringing an attitude of enjoyment towards food and eating back to the masses.

    Eating together has always been - and continues to be - an important setting for building connections with those around us. When we meet someone new or spend time with friends, it will generally be around a meal at a restaurant. We discuss, converse, and connect over food. What we need to revive is spending time around a meal every day. If we approach every meal with the same deliberateness that we approach special occassions, we can expect our “social health” to improve. Eating lunch with colleagues instead of in front of your computer at your desk and eating dinner with your family away from the TV nurtures conversation and helps build deeper connections with the people around you. Building stronger networks can help us feel less lonely and eating with others over conversation can make us eat slower and avoid overeating. By focusing on the experience of eating, we won’t worry constantly about the results of our consumption.

    Why have the French managed to have this lifestyle around food while Americans seems to have been struggling with their relationship with food for years? Perhaps this is because the United States, as a relatively young country, doesn’t have its own distinct food culture in the way that countries born from ancient civilizations do. France, India, and Italy are countries whose food cultures come to mind. Despite what seem like strong and prevasive food cultures in these and other similar countries, the appeal of fast food has spread to their citizens as well. The Italians were famously leery of McDonald’s when its first restaurant opened in Rome in the 1980s. With a few changes, McDonald’s has been slowly increasing its presence in Italy and turning Italians over to the convenience of fast food and a quick meal. Similarly, Indians have been experiencing rapidly increasing rates of incidence of heart disease as their once culturally-central dietary habits have changed to involve increased consumption of fast food and processed foods. Even the French aren’t immune to this phenomenon. Despite the significantly lower obesity rates in France than in the United States, these rates are on the rise as the French make the shift from enjoying the experience of eating fine foods to appreciating the convenience of eating fast food.

    Combatting our internal GPS that leads us to crave addictive foods and eat as fast as possible is not easy. If it was, then we wouldn’t have found ourselves in this position in the first place. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make the change - one individual at a time. Try an attitude change - think less about how each meal is going to affect your calorie count for the day and how much time it’s going to take out of your day and instead try making sure you’re eating at least one meal a day, un-rushed, with conversational companions. Over time, maybe you’ll find yourself looking forward to meals for more than just sating your hunger and hopefully you’ll find yourself less stressed about what its effects are going to be on your waistline.

    The Slow Food movement goes beyond just diet and the culture of eating. It covers anything that has an impact on and is impacted by food - this includes climate change, food waste, and agricultural practices, among other topics. Learn more at Slow Food International’s website!

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  • Oct 30, 2022

    Why It Matters If You Throw Away Food

    Hunger is a major humanitarian crisis. But the truth is that globally, we produce 1.5 times the amount of food that is needed to feed the entire world. The imbalance is in the distribution of food, and thus we cannot address hunger without first discussing food waste. In a globalized economy, food waste happens at multiple stages. We throw out “imperfect” produce because it won’t sell in grocery stores. We discard food that has gone bad before reaching supermarkets due to subpar storage. We lose food to the inefficiencies of the supply chain, when produce gets stuck at different stages between the farmer and the consumer and doesn’t stay fresh long enough to be sold. Even then, the most waste occurs at the consumer stage - thrown out in homes and restaurants due to improper portioning and buying produce that isn’t used in time. 30-40% of all food in the United States is ultimately wasted and in 2022, of all food waste in the United States, 43% came from homes and 40% from restaurants and grocery stores.

    Reducing food waste and improving food distribution can do more than just address hunger, but can also play a significant role in reducing the environmental impact of global agriculture. Food production is a large source of greenhouse gas emissions - in the US, agriculture accounted for 11% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020, and that’s only the growth and cultivation, without including emissions from transporting and storing food. If we’re producing 1.5x as much food as is needed to feed the entire world, that means that we could theoretically reduce agriculture-based greenhouse gas emissions by up to 33% by just taking our current methods of food cultivation and maximizing efficiency of growth and distribution. In 2021, the EPA published a survey of multiple studies evaluating the environmental impacts of American food loss and waste. These studies made estimates using various techniques that took into account some or all of the four stages of food production and consumption: primary production, distribution and processing, retail, and consumption. When considering one to all four of these stages, we find that American food waste annually accounts for emissions of anywhere between 113 and 270 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, which accounts for 1.9% to 4.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. While these may appear to be small percentages at first glance, consider that this is a significant fraction of emissions that are generated just from waste. Cutting this down to 0% can have a profoundly positive environmental impact.

    From an ethical standpoint, the most sickening type of waste - although no food waste should be acceptable - is the waste of meat. An entire animal had to die to provide you with the meat in your meal. Choosing to take more meat than you could eat in one meal and then throwing it out because you couldn’t or didn’t want to finish it is equivalent to killing an animal just to throw it away. To be clear, I am not saying that people shouldn’t eat meat altogether. The natural food web involves animals eating other animals all the time, and humans also fit into this food web as omnivores. But in a natural ecosystem, all meat is eaten - whether by the predator or by scavengers. When a person doesn’t finish their meal and throws out uneaten meat, the life of the animal has not been cycled into the food web. Instead, in short, the animal was actually just killed and thrown in the trash. Think about that the next time you begin putting more meat on your plate.

    We often don’t discuss food waste in concrete enough terms. Kids in the US are told to eat all the food on their plates because “kids elsewhere don’t have enough to eat.” While the sentiment may be correct, the message is not particularly effective. Kids can’t understand how finishing the food that their parents put on their plates will save another child from hunger. Obviously, the intended message is to be grateful for what you have, but maybe we need to talk about solutions for food waste that are easy to learn and implement. We should be teaching people how to listen to their bodies: take less food and return for more if you’re still hungry instead of taking too much food at once and throwing it away when you’re full. We should be teaching people that increased consumption is matched by increased production, so if consumers start buying just enough food, then maybe stores will cut down on how much food they keep in inventory, which will lead to less production, and potentially less waste. We should teach people that you are not the only one affected by the daily choice to waste food - due to our global economy, there are more people and creatures that are impacted by these choices than you may think. We should teach people to consider the source of everything they consume - just because you’re eating cooked meat right now doesn’t mean it just appeared in your bowl that way - think about where the meat came from and how your choices impacted the literal life of an animal. When every single person understands the global impact of their actions, maybe we will live in a more equitable world.

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  • Oct 17, 2022

    Let's Talk About Eggs

    Most people eat eggs - usually lots of them. The cartons that I get each week call eggs “Nature’s Convenience Food”, and for good reason. Run out of leftovers to eat? Crack an egg. Need to add volume to your dessert? Whip up an egg. Need more protein in your diet? Eat two eggs for breakfast. For something that we eat so often and so much of, people give surprisingly little thought to the origins of the eggs that make it to their plates.

    Not all eggs are created equal. There are four categories of eggs that you can typically buy from the grocery store. Standard (factory-farmed), cage-free, free-range, and pasture-raised. Factory-farmed eggs are so cheap because they require the least space and the least care for the chickens. Chickens are packed into cages and given no space to move around. These cages are not cleaned and the birds are forced to sit in their own filth for their entire lives. Cage-free is theoretically a step up, but the only difference in reality is that the individual cages are swapped out for one large tent under which hundreds and even thousands of chickens are packed together, resulting in a situation that is not much better than the standard factory farm method. Free-range chickens are given this designation as long as, according to the USDA, chickens are given “access to the out-of-doors” for over 51% of their lives. This is only marginally better than the last two classifications because access to the outdoors can mean as little as allowing a chicken to stick its head out into the fresh air without ever being able to step foot out of its coop. There isn’t even a per-animal space requirement, as long as the chicken can “access” the outdoors. Pasture-raised is both the best and the trickiest designation because it is not monitored by the USDA, but it is accurately approved by Certified Humane. Pasture-raised chickens are given unlimited time outside and given the freedom to roam and scratch for their own bugs in addition to the food they are fed. Each chicken needs to have at least 108 square feet of space and are required to have shelter and be able to go outside at any time except at night (for protection from predators). The chickens are unequivocally happier, healthier, and better treated in a pasture-raised environment. Just make sure you also look for the Certified Humane label, otherwise you might just be getting a different classification of eggs labeled with the pasture-raised identifier, since the USDA doesn’t regulate this particular phrase.

    Eggs from chickens that are raised better are generally more expensive. Pasture raised eggs will often be the most expensive eggs at the market because these chickens get more space and usually better feed and, as any rent-paying human knows, better food and more space cost more money. This price difference makes it easier for us to talk about how we value the animals that produce the food that we eat. In New York City (as of October 2022), I can find pasture-raised eggs for $7 a dozen at the grocery store while standard factory-farmed eggs will typically be around $4 a dozen. Let’s say you’re like me and eat about a dozen eggs a week. By choosing to eat pasture-raised eggs instead of factory-farmed eggs, you would spend $3 more a week than usual, which comes out to about $156 a year. So now we’ve put a price on the welfare of the chickens - the living creatures - that produce your eggs. By choosing to eat factory-farmed eggs, you’re actively making the assertion that the lives of the (at least) 3 or 4 chickens that laid your eggs that week are worth less than your $3. You have chosen to say that the lives of animals that are alive and breathing and constantly producing food for you to eat are worth so little that $3 is more important than supporting the farmers who treat their animals with respect.

    The quality of a chicken’s life is not a matter of opinion. These are facts about the animals that produce one of the most popular ingredients in the world and each individual carries a responsibility to living things to internalize this information and make the right decision for the welfare of creatures that can’t speak for themselves. The question is not a complicated one: how much do you value the life of another living being?

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