Jan 10
Fourteen Climate Reasons for Healthy Eating
How small diet changes can improve the environment.
Though we can all start at any moment, a new year revives energy and focus for many people to do and be better. But for many of the past decades, my ambitious new year’s resolutions failed before February arrived.
The failures never stopped me from reviving enthusiasm every December, with a promise to start anew on January 1. So new year, new strategy: micro-changes to lead toward macro results. I wish I could say it was an ah-ha-shower moment that popped this idea into my head. But, alas, the idea is inspired by Akshad Singi, who lists 20 micro-habits to move your personal-growth needle forward. Since 13 is my favorite number, I am applying the ‘…Make it incredibly small’ to my diet plan this year, and then look to see how the small changes can also impact other areas of interest, like, say, climate change.
Why climate change? Because my current state of mind is a constant feeling of unhealthiness and a continuous mental distraction from extreme weather and the extinction of many life forms here on Earth. And on many occasions, when I decided to look for ways to improve my health, I instead looked for the latest horrible news about the planet. The result? The diet stayed disappointing, and my quest for bad environmental news was always sated.
However, on one of these quests, I discovered Project Drawdown — an organization that lists 80+ solutions to reverse the climate crisis. Reading through the lists is both exciting and overwhelming. For instance, BioChar sounds like a hip and even exotic idea, but what if you don’t know the first thing about how to bring biochar into your everyday life? And, if you take the extra step to learn how to make biochar, what if you don’t have the means to make it?
Even reading their solution on how to reduce food waste intimidates me.
But if you want to do something even small to help, where does one start when the solutions seem too grand for one person? That is my dilemma — I want to help, but how? So I decided to list a few minor diet changes I can commit to doing, then took some creative liberties and looked for direct and indirect connections those changes might have to any of the Project Drawdown solutions.
To my surprise, I connected minor diet changes to as many as fourteen of the recommended solutions on Project Drawdown’s list. Now granted, my active imagination made leaps and bounds to come up with some of those connections. However, I went from whiney, helpless, useless climate advocate to taking an active part in fourteen solutions!
For example, a focus on improving our diet can mean:
1. Planning healthy meals that can help reduce food waste.
2. Having less food waste means less waste in the landfills, reducing methane gas.
3. Making conscious decisions to buy healthier grass-fed and free-ranging meats (through managed grazing practices).
4. If the ranchers are smart enough to have grass-fed stock, we assume they also invest in biomass digesters for their animals’ manure.
5. Planning our meals encourages us to support local farms and farmer markets for fresh(er) fruits, vegetables, eggs, and hand-craft cheeses.
6. (Assumption) local farmers practice good nutrient management of their crops and use fewer fertilizers.
7. Buying and eating local fresh foods means fewer refrigerants since foods travel direct from crops to table.
8. Buying from farmers’ markets means we buy foods in season, supporting perennial crops.
9. Supporting local farms and perennial crops may help degraded farmland renew and encourage conservation farming methods.
10. Or, increasing the demand for farmers’ markets can lead to refarming abandoned lands, or…
11. the lands can be used for tree plantations — or both.
12. Our fruit and vegetable wastes are suitable for a large or small composting pile.
13. With our compost, we can have mini-regenerative crops and grow and regrow our tomatoes and lettuce heads — in our kitchen!
14. And my favorite connection: those local farmers who we support will have crop wastes, too, and that waste can then be used for, you guessed it — biochar.
Maybe I can find more connections with the help of more coffee, but taking the time to find those connections is probably really me stalling from posting this article. So instead, I will post this and move on to see how many solutions I can link my LED bulbs to on the Drawdown list.
