If you think "eating healthy" means only what you eat, then it may be time to reconsider your definition of "healthy living."
Eating at Home
1. Reduce Waste
If you use plastic utensils or paper plates, swap them for real dishes and cloth napkins. It's also important to cut down on food waste, which another unnecessary drain on an environmental and financial resources.
I've long stated that planning your meals is important for a number of reasons, one of which is reducing the amount of food that will go to waste, since you'll only buy what you need each time you visit the store.
2. Try Composting
Leftover fruit and veggies scraps, leaves and grass clippings (only if not chemically treated) can turn into a valuable natural fertilizer if you compost them instead of throwing them in the trash.
3. Eat Your Leftovers
Rather than simply throwing leftover food in the trash, reduce the waste and save the energy of cooking another meal by revamping them into a new dish. You can, for instance, use the bones from a roast chicken to make stock for a pot of soup, extending a Sunday roast to use for weekday dinners, or throw some extra veggies in the fridge into your juicer to make a fresh green drink.
4. Double Your Recipes
This is a great way to save some cooking energy (yours and the oven's), as you can use one batch to eat right away and put the other in the freezer for another day.
5. Cook One or More "Local" Meals Per Week
If you're new to buying locally-grown foods, challenge yourself to create one meal a week solely from these foods. You can even invite some friends or neighbors in on the challenge, and have a locally-grown potluck dinner for sustainable, tasty eating and a night of socializing!
At a Restaurant
1. Skip the Bottles
Just as you avoid bottled water at home, skip it in restaurants too (if you're worried about quality, bring your own from home). You can also save waste by ordering beer on tap instead of in a bottle.
2. Eat at Restaurants That Purchase Local Food
Increasing numbers of restaurants are supporting local farmers to find the freshest, most sustainable sources of produce and other food. Support these restaurants and their efforts to make the world a better place.
3. Ask About the Food When You're Eating Out
It's ok, and encouraged, to ask your server or restaurant manager about where they get their food or how it's processed, and state your preferences as well. While they may be surprised by your interest, if enough people begin to inquire it could prompt them to start sourcing their foods from more natural, sustainable sources.
At the Store
1. Use Reusable Bags
Each year about 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide. At over 1 million bags per minute, that's a lot of plastic bags, of which billions end up as litter each year, contaminating oceans and other waterways.
Plastic bags, like the petroleum they are made from, don't biodegrade very well at all, rather, they photodegrade. Meaning, they break down into smaller and smaller toxic bits, which contaminate soil and waterways, and enters the food chain – animals accidentally eat these bits and pieces, mistaking them for food. It's estimated that 1 million birds and 100,000 turtles and other sea animals starve to death each year after consuming plastic debris, which blocks their digestive tracts.
Paper bags are not an environmentally friendly alternative, as millions of trees must be cut down to make them each year… and the process is very energy intensive.
Carry reusable shopping bags instead; keep them in the trunk of your car, or stash a couple of the small fold-up varieties in your purse so you're always prepared. You can also use avoid plastic produce bags (put the produce right into your reusable cloth bag instead) and use reusable cloth bags for packaging your child's school lunch and snacks.
2. Choose Foods with Minimal Packaging
If you can choose foods in bulk, unwrapped form, do so. Excess packaging only adds to the waste filling up landfills, and often it's made out of toxic materials (like Styrofoam, which may cause cancer and produces hazardous waste and gasses when manufactured).
One study conducted by Portland State University Food Industry Leadership Center, for the Bulk is Green Council (BIG), revealed that Americans could save an average of 89 percent on costs by buying their organic foods in bulk, compared to organic packaged counterparts.2 According to the report, if we purchased the following products in bulk for one year, it would save hundreds of millions of pounds of waste from going into landfills:
1. Reduce Waste
If you use plastic utensils or paper plates, swap them for real dishes and cloth napkins. It's also important to cut down on food waste, which another unnecessary drain on an environmental and financial resources.
I've long stated that planning your meals is important for a number of reasons, one of which is reducing the amount of food that will go to waste, since you'll only buy what you need each time you visit the store.
2. Try Composting
Leftover fruit and veggies scraps, leaves and grass clippings (only if not chemically treated) can turn into a valuable natural fertilizer if you compost them instead of throwing them in the trash.
3. Eat Your Leftovers
Rather than simply throwing leftover food in the trash, reduce the waste and save the energy of cooking another meal by revamping them into a new dish. You can, for instance, use the bones from a roast chicken to make stock for a pot of soup, extending a Sunday roast to use for weekday dinners, or throw some extra veggies in the fridge into your juicer to make a fresh green drink.
4. Double Your Recipes
This is a great way to save some cooking energy (yours and the oven's), as you can use one batch to eat right away and put the other in the freezer for another day.
5. Cook One or More "Local" Meals Per Week
If you're new to buying locally-grown foods, challenge yourself to create one meal a week solely from these foods. You can even invite some friends or neighbors in on the challenge, and have a locally-grown potluck dinner for sustainable, tasty eating and a night of socializing!
At a Restaurant
1. Skip the Bottles
Just as you avoid bottled water at home, skip it in restaurants too (if you're worried about quality, bring your own from home). You can also save waste by ordering beer on tap instead of in a bottle.
2. Eat at Restaurants That Purchase Local Food
Increasing numbers of restaurants are supporting local farmers to find the freshest, most sustainable sources of produce and other food. Support these restaurants and their efforts to make the world a better place.
3. Ask About the Food When You're Eating Out
It's ok, and encouraged, to ask your server or restaurant manager about where they get their food or how it's processed, and state your preferences as well. While they may be surprised by your interest, if enough people begin to inquire it could prompt them to start sourcing their foods from more natural, sustainable sources.
At the Store
1. Use Reusable Bags
Each year about 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide. At over 1 million bags per minute, that's a lot of plastic bags, of which billions end up as litter each year, contaminating oceans and other waterways.
Plastic bags, like the petroleum they are made from, don't biodegrade very well at all, rather, they photodegrade. Meaning, they break down into smaller and smaller toxic bits, which contaminate soil and waterways, and enters the food chain – animals accidentally eat these bits and pieces, mistaking them for food. It's estimated that 1 million birds and 100,000 turtles and other sea animals starve to death each year after consuming plastic debris, which blocks their digestive tracts.
Paper bags are not an environmentally friendly alternative, as millions of trees must be cut down to make them each year… and the process is very energy intensive.
Carry reusable shopping bags instead; keep them in the trunk of your car, or stash a couple of the small fold-up varieties in your purse so you're always prepared. You can also use avoid plastic produce bags (put the produce right into your reusable cloth bag instead) and use reusable cloth bags for packaging your child's school lunch and snacks.
2. Choose Foods with Minimal Packaging
If you can choose foods in bulk, unwrapped form, do so. Excess packaging only adds to the waste filling up landfills, and often it's made out of toxic materials (like Styrofoam, which may cause cancer and produces hazardous waste and gasses when manufactured).
One study conducted by Portland State University Food Industry Leadership Center, for the Bulk is Green Council (BIG), revealed that Americans could save an average of 89 percent on costs by buying their organic foods in bulk, compared to organic packaged counterparts.2 According to the report, if we purchased the following products in bulk for one year, it would save hundreds of millions of pounds of waste from going into landfills:
- Coffee: 240 million pounds of foil packaging saved from landfills
- Almonds: 72 million pounds of waste saved from landfills
- Peanut butter: 7 pounds of waste saved from landfills per family
- Oatmeal: Saves five times the waste of its packaged equivalent
3. Ditch Bottled Water
Bottled water is perhaps one of the most environmentally unfriendly industries there is. Americans consume about half a billion bottles of water every week! The environmental ramifications of this practice are enormous. The video below, The Story of Bottled Water, brought to you by the folks who created the wildly successful video The Story of Stuff, does an excellent job of illustrating the truth about bottled water. Instead of bottled water, drinking filtered tap water is a healthier, more sustainable option. (Take it with you on the go using a glass water bottled.)
www.vegware.co.za
