Wednesday: Food

Today's challenge: "Healthy eating can also lessen your foodprint."  Although healthy eating comes naturally to me (and I am a vegetarian), I know that a lot of what I eat still travels a very long way to get to my plate.  You can look at your own foodprint here.

With the challenges of eating all local, organic, seasonal, unpackaged food, this was a hard day.  It's almost impossible to find all four of those characteristics in any one food product.  I've been shopping solely at the farmer's market so far this week, but not everything there is organic (or even unpackaged).  The choice often becomes to buy local-but-non-organic or go across the street to Whole Foods and buy organic-but-non-local.  Of course I prefer organic food, but that could very likely mean buying something that was flown from Peru to get to me.

Knowing how obsessive I can get, I don't want to let myself get too carried away with these endless choices, because there are a million of them and I have to deal with food every day.  And with the goal of not creating unnecessary trash, food decisions can become pretty stressful with a busy life in NYC.  Ah, how intricately everything is connected...  So I've decided that what I can realistically commit to right now is to only buy food that was grown in the U.S., and for it to be organic whenever possible.  And when my schedule calms down a bit and I have more time to cook at home, I'd also like to join a CSA :)

P.S. The Eat Well Guide is also a nice resource for finding good food anywhere...