Sustainable Food Shopping

Just a quick post this time, but I've been sitting staring at the avocados I always feel bad about buying and thinking about why it is so difficult to buy things that are sustainable and ethical.  It seems so easy to just fall back into the old habits of buying things that don't really align with how we are trying to live at the moment. 

Picture taken from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46459714

After re-researching about the emissions, water usage, and general sustainability of the food we eat I felt a lot better about the food choices we're making, especially as greatly reducing your consumption of meat is still the best way of reducing your emissions.  I also felt a lot less guilty about eating avocados (their emissions and water usage isn't great, but is still no where near that produced and used by meat, especially beef) and about eating a plant based diet that has gone a little bit of travelling.  However, whilst we have been picking the best options I would like us to build on that further.

The hardest one is going to be packaging.  I do try and reduce the amount of plastic that comes into our homes, but it seems to be getting harder to find vegetables that aren't all wrapped up.  Not only does that mean bringing home more plastic than I want to, but it also makes it harder to reduce your food waste as you can't just buy only what you need.  Even when I've gone to a greengrocers some of the vegetables are still pre-bagged, but it is definitely much less than in supermarkets which has reminded me that when it comes to buying vegetables it would be better for me to go to the grocers instead.  It's something that I've gotten out of the habit of doing, but could easily pick up again.  On the plus side, and despite not being able to choice the quantity of vegetables that we buy, we are pretty good when it comes to not having a lot of food waste.

Got these from this Etsy shop https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/askingfortrouble

There are also specific styles of food that we like to eat and the recipes we follow don't necessarily have vegetables that are seasonal for us here in the UK.  Whilst the latest research has shown that the distance the food travels isn't the main issue when it comes to carbon emissions, now that we've worked on the other impacts our food could have I'd like to work on the distance it travels as well.  We're pretty lucky in the UK in the fact that there is quite a lot of food that is grown here now and I have a list of what food is in season throughout the year.  Before I had decided I would work out what food was available that month and then work out what we were going to eat from that, but actually I kept finding that a little bit overwhelming.  Now I'm going to do it the other way around.  Once we've decided what meals we want to eat I'm going to look at what vegetables are available then and tweak the recipes to fit that instead.  That should work out a lot better.

So, just a couple of changes that I want to make to how we eat.  Once we've made those into habits than I'll start looking at the way in which we cook our food as that has an impact too, it's just a very small percentage and therefore not the biggest thing to worry about.  Hopefully these little changes are ones that I can make relatively easily.  It should also help us save money as well.