Carbon footprint or healthy diet?
My wife and I regularly do our shopping on Thursdays. We
stock up with provisions for the week. We don’t do a great deal of thinking
before we purchase things we want. Mostly the stuff we buy is similar from week
to week. We get the staples: bread, milk, cereal, meats and vegetables. If
there’s any chore to it, the burden lies with my wife, because she devises menus
and does the cooking; therefore, if anyone has to think, it is her.
I like a balanced diet, and I prefer freshly prepared meals
to frozen readymade ones that only require heating in an oven or in a
microwave. Processed meals tend to have far too much salt, fat and sugar in
them, and as we’ve been hearing of late, they may not match the description on
the label. Perhaps we’ve been eating horsemeat while believing it was beef.
Most of us wouldn’t know the difference, and I suspect we have unknowingly been
misled.
I am not averse to eating horsemeat, but I would prefer to
be given the option through the correct labelling of meat. I understand that
some French people eat frogs and horsemeat, but as far as I’m concerned I never
want to discover I’ve been eating frogs when I thought I was eating snails!
Please get the labelling right, and be honest. In fact, I would not choose to eat snails, and
in the same vein I do not enjoy eating mussels or cockles.
If I were forced to make a choice between being a vegetarian
and a carnivore I would definitely prefer eating vegetables, especially as there
is a proven correlation between those who eat large quantities of fatty meat
and those who die with stomach or colon cancer. A happy balance is to be found
in the omnivore who eats both vegetables and meats.
We only need look around to see that a quarter of the UK
population is obese - a word that overweight, rotund people do not like,
preferring fat, because it sounds kinder and less hurtful. The truth is, most
such people would give their right arm to be slim, but it is beyond their ability
to do anything about it. Mostly their condition comes about through bad diet
because of eating takeaway foods that are heavily impregnated with saturated
fats, sugars, and too much carbohydrate. Fizzy, sugary drinks add to the
problem.
Ideally, we should return to eating local produce, preferably
vegetables and fruit we grow in our own gardens or allotments. Today, the way
we live in little boxes with no access to plots of land makes this ideal
situation almost impossible. The next best thing is to buy from local markets,
but there are few of them. Now there is little option, other than the supermarket.
There we find food from all over the world, but at the expense of pollution
through carbon emissions. Food bought at supermarkets is heavily packaged and
often it is far from fresh.
This is the wisdom of man.
Links
Recycling, Carbon Footprints and
Survival
Garbage, Rubbish, Trash
Carbon Footprint
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