Because of the pandemic, we’re not going out to eat as much, but staying home and cooking. What do we need to know to eat sustainably?
One thing we can do is to stop being as picky about the “beauty” of the vegetables we buy. An artist in London came up with an installation to make a point. He dumped twenty-nine tons of carrots in front of a University of London building. One of the points he was making is that all of those carrots had been rejected by supermarket chains as too “ugly” to sell. Of course they all were nutritionally valuable, just not attractive enough. Now that the farm markets are closing for the season it is harder to find fresh carrots or any other vegetable that is perfectly fine other than size or shape. But there is a company, Misfits Market, that will deliver a box of organic produce to your door that may not make the cut at the big chains, but will feed your family just fine.
We also might want to reconsider our diets. I know I have been eating more vegetarian meals since I began studying sustainability and cutting way back on red meat. There are real health benefits to moving toward a plant based diet. There are also benefits to the earth. This article from Grist discusses the advancements in producing “fake meat” and the destructive aspects of our current meat-based diet.
There are some sustainable cookbooks to explore. The classic is “More-With-Less Cookbook: A World Community Cookbook” by Doris Janzen Longacre and Rachel Marie Stone. Trudy and I used it a lot as we were raising our boys. You can check out the list of newer cookbooks on this Eco-News Network site. If you want to delve more deeply into the sustainable food movement, the Audubon Society has published this list of recommended reading.
Happy sustainable reading, shopping, cooking and eating!
~Elliott
You can find this and all the Creation Care blogs for the church website I have written at a consolidating blog I have created: ststephenscreationcare.blogspot.com
Thanks for your interest in caring for God’s creation!
