The mantra of the green movement is affecting every area of life including the food industry. We live in a world where innovations are springing everywhere to try and reduce our impact on the environment and you must try and do your fair bit.
The following are three foods that you can cut out of your diet, that will both make you healthy, as well as reduce your impact on the environment.
1. Eat less rice
A major part of the impact that humans are having on the environment is the runoffs from agricultural fields and farmlands. Pesticides and fertilizers, as well as species introduction are three major issues of environmental impact from farmlands. Among these, the cultivation of rice is a major culprit, as it requires huge amounts of pesticides and fertilizers to cultivate and heavy machinery, that destroy and scar the land face and release carbon dioxide fumes and fuel spillage to the environment.
To discourage or reduce this, eat less rice and instead concentrate on other similar grains like millet, amaranth pilaf, and teff.
2. Reduce palm oil consumption
Palm oil is probably the most widely used cooking oil on the planet, found in everything from fries to soap and butter to cereal. They are even the default cooking oil of choice in third world countries, where if you were to enter a boutique and ask for cooking oil, they would automatically think you were talking of palm oil.
There is nothing particularly wrong with palm oil, except the way it is farmed. Huge sections of forests have to be cleared to make space for palm trees to grow and some of these forests contain exquisite wildlife that could extinct.
3. Eat less meat
The best Eco-protein solution you could possibly make in the area of foods, is deciding not to eat meat, or reducing your meat intake. Meat, especially of those reared like beef, lamb, pork, poultry, and famed fish, is often processed in centers that give out a lot of waste that hurt the environment. The animals are also sometimes mistreated. Huge amounts of water and other chemicals are used in the rearing process, encouraging waste. Your best option is to acquire more of your proteins from plant sources, as they use fewer resources and churn out less waste than animal rearing.
Numerous researches also say that acquiring your nutrients from plant sources is healthier than from animal sources, because the process used in preparing the meat for consumption, both in the factory and at home, usually destroys or removes a lot of these nutrients, but instead creates byproducts that are harmful for the body.
Image courtesy by: img.taste.com.au, assets.rbl.ms, foodsafety.gov.
