Food for thought: choosing the right foods for you and the environment
With more ‘green’ products vying for our dollars, making good food choices can feel harder than ever. Our experts cut through the spin to help you pick foods that are good for you and the planet.
With every dollar we spend, we make a choice about the kind of world we want to live in. We can support animal rights or animal cruelty, we can choose sustainability or products that have flown around the world, puffing out clouds of CO₂. Lately, retailers and manufacturers have begun to cater to Australian shoppers’ growing interest in making more ethical choices at the checkout.
If I want to make an ethical choice when buying milk, for example, my local supermarket offers more than 20 different options. Various types of cow, of course, depending on whether I’d like to support dairy farmers over corporate profits, or whether I’d like my milk made by cows grazing on organic pastures. But there’s also almond, oat and coconut “milk”, unsweetened rice “milk”, cold-pressed jersey raw, pasteurised goat milk, something called Fortune Fresh soy drink and Farmhouse Gold Organic, which is more than $5 for 1.5 litres. Which of these is better for me and better for the planet? After scrutinising every label, I’m still not sure.
The egg aisle has fewer options, but little more clarity. There are free range, cage free and something called
“hen coop” illustrated by a farm scene straight out of the imagination of Walt Disney, but which is, Talulah Gaunt from the RSPCA tells me, just a euphemism for cages. “You think, ‘Oh that’s quite nice. It sounds like old McDonald’s farm,’ but it’s actually cages,” she says.
Then there’s the protein aisle. Rethinking our meat choices is, we’re told, where we can do the most good for the planet. According to The Economist, making two-thirds of our meals vegan could cut our greenhouse emissions by 60 per cent. But packaging information in the protein aisle is incredibly opaque.
My household viewed fish as a better alternative to red meat, until I started reading about the depletion of fish stocks. So, should we look for farmed fish? Not necessarily, according to reports about the pollution caused by aquaculture.
All of these questions swirl around in our heads every time we step into the supermarket, and that’s before we factor in health, price and waste. So how on earth do we make good choices?
“It can be quite confusing,” says Mark Boulet, from Monash’s Sustainable Development Institute. He’s worked in sustainability for two decades and says, “I still find myself standing in a supermarket aisle going, ‘Oh my God, which one of these is better?’
“Is it better to go local, which reduces food miles? Or is it better to get a non-toxic one from the UK?”
The Weekly asked experts on animal welfare, waste reduction and sustainability for advice on making ethical food choices. Some of it conflicted but there was one thing they all agreed on: “Start simply,” says Mark. “Choose one or two areas. Make a goal like, I’m just going to do something about eggs. It’s better to do a few small things than to get overwhelmed and not do anything.”