Think Global, Eat Local

Seems that there are more reasons to cut back on meat than just your health. My wife heard an NPR Morning Edition story on industrialized food production and the resources needed to produce that steak we all love:

"Meat's not grown near the feed crop anymore," says Roz Naylor, a senior fellow at the Woods Institute of the Environment at Stanford University and the Director of Stanford's new program on Food Security and the Environment. "You're transporting grain all the way across the world to feed cattle that will get shipped all the way across the world to meet consumer demand in a totally different country."

Naylor says to get the same calories out of meat that we would get out of direct grain consumption, you have to use anywhere from three to seven times the amount of energy.

This prompted conversation at our house in a variety of directions, including the idea that in 25 years the business of bottling water in some remote place like Fiji, putting it on a boat, train, then semi-truck to take it to your local supermarket will appear ridiculous.

We're not quite there in our house -- we still drink bottled water. But we've made a small change.

After heading out to the recycling trash can, I was shocked to see how many small water bottles we were using each week. Americans tossed more than 22 billion empty plastic bottles in the trash last year. In bottle production alone, the more than 70 million bottles of water consumed each day in the U.S. drain 1.5 million barrels of oil over the course of one year.

We've contributed our share to that tally. So now we've all got individual, reusable Camelbak bottles that we fill off one 2.5 gallon Arrowhead bottle. I realize it's a tiny thing, utterly insignificant in the global scheme of things, but it's an easy change too.

Looking at all the challenges the environment faces can be daunting. It's enough to make you want to bury your head in the sand. But don't fret. As Vicki Vasil's excellant story on the green movement in our industry points out, this is a marathon, not a sprint. So start slow and build on your success.

There are other steps we've taken as well. We belonged to a community supported agriculture (CSA) project here in San Diego called the Be Wise Ranch. Every week we'd head over to a house and pick up a large box of locally grown, certified organic fruits and vegetables.

We never could figure out what to do with all the Bok Choy, and we've let our membership slip in the past few weeks, but "eat locally" programs like these are fairly common and certainly worth checking out. Find out more here.

Tomatoes, flowers, and strawberries are all grown within a few miles of my house. I like that. I will sorely miss those fields when the march of development finally bulldozes them under.

So I enjoy them while they last. The U Pick strawberry field, located across the lagoon from us, is in full swing this week and we fill two large containers of carefully chosen and perfectly ripe strawberries. But an equal number are scarfed on the spot, long before they even get near the buckets.