The Little Green Lies We Love to Tell Ourselves — And the Harder, More Sustainable Truth About Our Food System

You and I are good people, right? We know what’s at stake (the climate, the environment, our health and the health of our loved ones) and we make the effort.

Photo credit: iStock

By The ethos and Renee Guilbault

The corporate food world has sold us on some beautiful green lies, all designed to keep us comfortably consuming in the ways we’ve grown used to.

You and I are good people, right? We know what’s at stake (the climate, the environment, our health and the health of our loved ones) and we make the effort. We buy our take-out lunches in biodegradable packaging. When we buy plastic containers at the grocery store, we put them in the blue bin — even that hard-to-clean peanut butter tub. We load up the rest of our trash into compostable bags, and when the garbage truck comes to cart it all away we watch from the window, holding a warm cup of coffee made with a “recyclable” pod and having a feel-good moment about our choices. Then we go back to the shops or the drive-through and start the whole cycle all over again.

Well, get ready — because I’m about to crack open that cozy little clamshell package we’ve all been living in, and it’s gonna hurt a bit. If you think the pile of containers in your blue bin is coming back as fresh new products or that those compostable bags and single-use cutlery bits are all out there under a green field somewhere helping to push up flowers, you better think again. The corporate food world has sold us on some beautiful green lies, all designed to keep us comfortably consuming in the ways we’ve grown used to. Now, it’s high time to take a hard look at a few of those lies, so we can figure out together if we want to keep telling them back to ourselves.

The lie: Recycling solves plastic waste.

The truth: Only 5 to 6 percent of plastic waste in the U.S. is recycled. As the Center for Climate Integrity says, “the majority of plastics cannot be recycled — they never have been and never will be.” And plastic…