The March Hare: Summer 2006 Issue 49

Co-ops • Starting Something • The Way We Eat • Ironweed Maturing • Getting There • Crossword

The Way We Eat

By Juan Borla

By living at Dancing Rabbit, I feel we've made a commitment to trying to live as environmentally sustainably as we can. This includes obvious things, such as recycling our waste and conserving resources directly. It also includes less obvious things, like making certain lifestyle choices.

One of the areas of life that I find easily overlooked when one is considering the environmental impact of our actions is food. Large amounts of energy are used every day in the production, care, and transport of food.

Bobolink, one of our food co-ops, puts a great deal of thought and energy into this one aspect of our lives. It's taken years, but the members have struck a balance between being environmentally friendly, socially conscious, nutritionally healthy, and happy with our food. These issues are hardly unique to Bobolink, and every food co- op at DR has had to wrestle with these same problems, and come up with different solutions.

First, we chose to make eating bioregionally a priority. This involves growing some of our food, and buying the rest from growers as close to us as we can get. For example, we buy produce from neighbors rather than at a supermarket. The logic behind this choice is simple: the less distance our food has to travel, the less energy and fossil fuels it takes to get it to us.

Eating bioregionally isn't particularly easy, however. We live in a temperate climate, which means that foods that are tropical generally stay off the menu. As such, we refrain from buying most citrus fruits, avocados, and other delicious treats, since they would have to be shipped from farther away than we'd like.

One large difficulty in trying to eat local foods is with grains and beans. Local farmers grow very few grains, so we find ourselves ordering the rest from a national bulk food company. Regrettably, we have no way of knowing from where the food we're ordering comes. We do the best we can, buying foods that could be grown nearby, and avoiding those that could not.

A part of bioregional eating that took a lot of getting used-to for me was the idea of food seasons. Most food crops aren't grown year-round, and some foods are only in season for a few weeks out of the year. As such, we do a lot of food preservation at Bobolink. We dry and can seasonal foods all throughout the warmer months so we can enjoy them in the winter.

Bobolink has made another big choice when it comes to food; we're a vegan food co-op. As a group, we buy no meat, no dairy, no eggs, no animal products at all (unless you consider honey an animal product, in which case that's our one exception). Of course, individual members are free to do as they wish when not cooking for the rest of the group, but meals cooked for everyone must be entirely vegan.

The environmental impact of a vegan diet is straightforward: on average, raising meat requires significantly more resources than growing plants. For example, according to the USDA, farm animals eat 70% of the grain we grow as a country. Fresh water is another area where animal agriculture is a big resource drain, with farm animals drinking fully half of the US water supply.

We also try to eat organically-grown food as much as possible. Chemical pesticides are frequently petroleum-based, and contaminate the ground and strip nutrients from it. To compensate, traditional agriculture uses vast amounts of chemical fertilizer. Both those pesticides and the fertilizer are shipped to the farms from manufacturing plants - consuming energy in the form of transportation fuel. Organically-grown crops don't use these chemicals, and as such are less likely to need all that energy for transportation.

Each one of these choices helps a little. However, it's the combination of all of them that makes a big difference. Of course, our system isn't perfect, as we have to balance these environmental concerns with nutritional, financial, and quality-of-life issues. Other co-ops at DR have reached different solutions to the same problems, and I consider their choices to be as valid as ours. This is just what we do, and why we do it.

Bon appetit.

Co-ops • Starting Something • The Way We Eat • Ironweed Maturing • Getting There • Crossword