Changing Eating Habits Can Help Our Health and the Environment

Copyright (c) 2011 Alison Withers

Many of us want to do whatever we can to help prevent long-term damage to the environment but, apart from reducing petrol consumption and waste and recycling everything we can, there is another way of doing our bit and that is by paying attention to what we eat and shopping sustainably.

Looking more closely at what we eat and considering changing our diet can have benefits not only for our health but also for the planet. In the same way, asking questions and putting pressure on large retail chains about packaging and about where they source produce has already been shown to have an impact.

The growth of re-usable bags, fair-trade and locally-sourced produce in our stores is evidence of this.

In the current economic circumstances when prices are rising and the future looks so uncertain, naturally shoppers are looking for ways to keep the food bill under control.

While supermarket chains regularly have multiple buy bargains and special offers, these are of little use if the result is that the economies and savings made are thrown away because we can't use all that we have bought by their use by date.

However, it is possible to avoid much of this by looking at and perhaps changing our eating habits and the result could be not only more sustainable shopping but also healthier diets.

Meat, for example, is notoriously energy inefficient no matter where it is produced. It may be that we can and should eat less of it in relation to fruit and vegetables. We can also cut down on the staggering 40% of food we throw away each year and still take advantage of those supermarket deals by planning ahead, perhaps cooking a batch of meals to use up what we've bought and then freezing the surplus for future meals.

Sustainability is not only the responsibility of consumers, however. More unified action and co-operation could help make the the whole food production processmore sustainable if the food processing companies, farmers, governments and the developers of innovative agricultural products all play their parts.

The food production industry could reconsider how much packaging it needs to use, for example.

In 2010 the UK government publicised its intention to create a "supermarket ombudsman" to put pressure on the big retail chains in order to protect both farm incomes and consumer prices and health. There has been a deafening silence on the initiative since then and it perhaps should be put into action.

Governments can come together to produce simpler, more efficient and more unified policies for registering new agricultural innovations more quickly and affordably.

Farmers and biopesticides developers who research and devise low-chem agricultural products that are kinder to the environment have repeatedly raised this issue, particularly in Europe, where the previous generations of chemical-based pesticides are being rapidly withdrawn.

More of the new generation of biopesticides, biofungicides and yield enhancers are starting to be rolled out into Europe, because of partnerships between the biopesticides developers and the big industrial producers.

The licensing process, however, is still taking far too long when put into the context of the urgency that the UN Food and Agriculture Programme identifies of the need to dramatically increase food production to meet the demand of a growing global population, improve nutrition and access to affordable food and protect the vulnerable from price-induced food scarcity.

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