Sunday, February 24, 2013

Food for Thought



 
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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