Ariel's Blog Post

There are many considerations I take into account when eating. These considerations are very dependent upon my schedule that day. If I only have a few minutes to eat when busy, I’ll generally grab some sort of quick, pre-packaged food. If I have a busy day and have a bit of time the night before, I’ll cook or prepare something beforehand to have ready the next day. Considerations other than time that I take into account when eating include nutrition, as I generally try to eat healthfully.

The concept of taking “environmental considerations in mind” when selecting foods is, to be honest, not something I had really thought of before. In the past, I have attempted to cut down on the amount of packaging associated with my food. However, this has proved very difficult for me. Regardless of whether I am grabbing a quick meal or making a recipe form scratch, I am always astonished at the amount of packaging that surrounds the food items we buy. Some of this packaging is obvious— halloween candy for example is individually wrapped and then placed in a plastic bag. However, packaging also comes into play in terms of a homemade sandwich. True, the sandwich itself might only be wrapped in a small piece of aluminum foil once created. But, the lettuce in that sandwich was once in a plastic bag, the cheese and meat were once wrapped in paper and then placed in a plastic bag, and the condiments were all straight out of a heavy plastic bottle. Think not only of this packaging, but also of the amount of energy it takes to produce this packaging.

There is a Buddhist philosophical practice that relates to this notion of thinking of the energy behind the packaging. Buddhists believe in principles of interdependence and emptiness of self. Many of them, thus, before eating, engage in a special ritual: They “trace” the food they are about to eat back to its “roots.” So, a plate of spaghetti gets traced back to, essentially, the sun (as pasta comes from wheat and wheat grows thanks to the sun). Being a Buddhist, I sometimes do this ritual myself. It makes me painfully aware of the complexities that surround modern food. We no longer trace the pasta back to the sun so easily. Instead, we trace it back to the trucks that brought it to the store, to the oil that made those trucks run, to the factory in which it was produced, to the trees used to manufacture the box, and to the energy used by machines to get all the pasta looking perfectly symmetrical.

Of the food items I’ve consumed in the past few days, I would have to say that the one that caused the greatest environmental impact is a bottle of soda. I determined this based on several things. The soda bottle is made from plastic, which in turn contains oil and requires energy to produce. The label on the soda bottle is a similar story. The labeled bottle would then be shipped, which also requires oil, to the store from which I bought it. The bottle remained refrigerated in that store until I bought it, requiring much energy. Finally, the main consideration I made in determining that this bottle of soda was harmful to the environment was the notion that it not only was exhaustive to produce but also impossible to do anything with afterwards! Recycling plastic is much more difficult and economically wasteful than is recycling aluminum. In addition, plastic is not biodegradable. Thus, not only was my soda a pain to produce, it will remain a pain for quite a long time.