Tricia is a sustainable food staff writer for Justmeans. She is passionate about food: growing it, helping others grow it, and eating it. She is an environmental educator who has been working in community-based education for fourteen years. She enjoys growing food in her small garden and runs a gardening mentorship program for local families. She's also a member of six community supported agricult...
Sustainable Food and Living Low On the Waste Chain
When we think about sustainable food, we usually think about the food itself. Organic? Check. Local? Check. However, we don't always think about what surrounds our food. That organic nacho that is packaged in a box and inside a bag is organic, surely. But is it sustainable? Not as much as the raw corn that created it.
If you want to shift to a life of living low on the waste chain, begin by becoming more sustainable in the grocery aisle. Look at the produce section first. Choose raw and unprocessed food and place it in mesh produce bags, removing all plastic and waste from your own food chain. Join Community Supported Agriculture shares to reduce the number of hands and packages that your food goes through before it reaches your home.
Become more sustainable through reuse as well. Think back to the 1930s. Nothing was wasted then. Do the same now. Choose food with packaging that is usable in the home, whether this is in the compost bin or as a child's art project. We often forget that the tenet goes reduce, reuse, recycle. It is not recycle, reuse, reduce. Reusing is more important and beneficial than recycling, especially if the reuse changes your need to buy another object. If you reuse wax paper from food items, you may reduce your purchases of wax paper. If you reuse cardboard as a child's art supplies, you reduce your need to buy art supplies.
If you must eat something not so sustainable that comes wrapped in Styrofoam or plastic, keep the packaging and see if it is recyclable in your community. Some communities have pay-to-recycle programs for those hard to recycle plastics. Use these programs. Keep food waste off of other packaging like paper so that you can recycle it.
No, reducing your food packaging will not necessarily save the world. Let's be more specific than that. Reducing your food packaging will save landfill space. It will reduce the contamination of water and soil around landfills. It will reduce incinerator pollution. It will reduce the amount of plastic that is created and thereby reduce the amount of oil that is pumped from the ground to create that plastic. Reducing packaging will reduce the amount of metal that is mined and the energy used to recycle metal containers. While reducing your food packaging may not be the largest sustainable impact you can make on the planet, it is a significant step toward less-processed food and a lower-impact life.
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