Choosing Sustainable Food: Affordability vs Nutrition vs Environmental Impact

You’re not alone if balancing these three factors feels like a daunting juggling act!  

I touched on affordability in my first post, and now I’ll delve a little deeper.   

As a physically active student with loans who also wants to make the right consumer choices, I can speak to some of the emotions that readers may be experiencing. Organic, nutritious, planet-friendly foods often seem to come with a price tag that may feel over the top. Yet, the more we are able to develop a vocabulary and strategy around the decision-making process of being a responsible and healthy food purchaser, the more manageable this all feels. Keep reading to see what I mean.   

A passion of mine is health literacy, defined broadly by the World Health Organization as the ability of individuals to “gain access to, understand and use information in ways which promote and maintain good health” for themselves, their families and their communities.   

Climate literacy involves the ability to stay informed and feel empowered about choices affecting our natural world. In fact, climate literacy is viewed as inseparable from health literacy. Climate literacy helps a person decipher personally relevant meaning from the sea of information that is out there and take charge of the decision-making process. Possible by Design already addresses this concept by looking at deciphering jargon and speaking to the social justice component of vulnerable populations being the most affected by pollution they did not cause via geographical displacement. 

Bringing this idea to my daily experience, I can speak to how disempowering it is to be in a supermarket and not see the carbon footprint labels I need to see in order to make the best decisions.   

It is a lot of work to figure it out myself.  I must carefully look at tiny print to see where the item was manufactured, then distributed. Beware products that are manufactured in your country (for me, Canada) but with ingredients or materials sourced and shipped from the farthest possible point on the planet! For me in Vancouver, what if a product was made in the United States but the distance is closer than Toronto? So many factors to consider.   

Admittedly, I have gone in both directions, choosing products sourced and/or manufactured from farther away, in Ontario, for example (but supportive of Canada’s economy) and also goods from outside the country  (travelling from a shorter distance and more supportive of an international economy).   

Next, while standing in the aisle trying to decide what goes in my basket next, I must, if possible, try to find out from the company website or the internet what items are shipped, versus flown, versus trucked. And, if I am looking at produce, what environments were they grown in?  What kind of packaging do the items come in? Produce grown in natural sunlight versus a hothouse and that are shipped rather than flown, for example, and are in clearly recyclable packages, is the best bet.   

There are some websites that have already done some of this work for me. Dr. Hannah Ritchie created an excellent resource for non- dairy beverages; however, that also requires the supermarket to have internet, my hands not to be too full to be able to zoom in on the data, and my head not to be too full (which as a master’s student is hard! Lol).  

I have to work all of this out in my head weighing factors that helpful reduce my carbon footprinting (like a company’s net zero commitments) against ones that don’t (like a far travelling distance), while also checking that the nutrition fits my dietary goals. Now I have some nutritional training and so those decisions don’t take too much time. For those without that knowledge base, the mental energy could potentially be all- consuming to juggle both sets of priorities (Possible by Design, by the way, has done some of this work for you-- their Cut Costs, Cut Carbon: Food (Protein) resource for instance lays out emissions and cost side by side across common protein sources).  

Inevitably, back in the grocery store, I think through what I can in the moment and still go home feeling ok. For example, when I chose  non- dairy beverages , (compared to dairy milk), I chose: 

1. the creation of around three times less greenhouse gas emissions, and the use of around ten times less land and two- to- twenty times as less fresh water.  

2. a nutritionally sound option. 

However, even then,  I remain uncertain if I’ve gone with the right choice of non- dairy beverage. For example in a battle of almond versus soy milk, the production of almond milk leads to lower greenhouse gas emissions and less land use than soy, for example, but requires more water and results in higher eutrophication (the non-planetary-friendly process of the accumulation of minerals such as nitrogen into water bodies). Can a girl ever win?  

There are few items that check off all the boxes, and I end up still having a feeling that while I’ve figured out some of the factors that would make me feel the best about the environmental impact of my purchase, what if I still don’t yet have the whole picture? Any measure that helps still the mind and bring in calm to the equation is essential.   

This in short, is why mandatory carbon footprint labels are so important. They step up the climate and (therefore health) literacy of the process and brings a consumer out of the state of apathy and/or overwhelm and towards a state of self-determination and informed decision-making. Figuring it all out for myself as described above eventually involves that satisfying step of voting with my dollar providing I have the time to sort out the math with every product I purchase. But is it a vote based on all information clearly at hand? Only with carbon footprint labels can this happen.   

In summary, it is important to consider  

1. Where was the product made?  

2. Where was the product manufactured?  

3. If information is available on this, was the product shipped, trucked or flown?   

4. If information is available, with produce for example, was the product made in a hothouse or in a natural environment?  

5. Are there environmental implications of manufacturing (deforestation for example?)  

6. Is the packaging recyclable?   

OR  

The federal government could require carbon footprint labels and us consumers can just focus on the price and the meal we’re planning to make when we get home! 

So what can actually be done about all this? For starters, why not let your MP know now how important mandatory footprint disclosure is with a letter? And allow yourself to take one more tiny, self- empowered breath next time you’re getting food for the week.  😊