Responsible Choices in the Current Food Market

A worker at a coffee processing plant owned by a farmers' cooperative organization in Costa Rica.
We visited this plant last winter. Costa Rica supports very responsible agriculture and human welfare:
these issues are very important to me.

During my childhood and most of my adult life, the only motives driving our family's food choices were whether we liked the food, and whether it was good for us. Affordability was a distant third motive because in the United States, food has been kept very affordable for members of the middle class like our family. I'm aware that this is a privilege!

Recently, I've become aware of numerous additional reasons to choose or to avoid certain foods or classes of foods. These concerns lead me to ask myself many questions about my selection of food, and I take them seriously. Should I buy more locally grown produce and meat where available and in season? How can I make the most responsible choices for preserving the environment? Can my decisions be more humane? For quite a few years I've been attempting to buy climate-safe fish, following the recommendations of several watch-dog organizations, and I'm now avoiding meat from the packing plants where the workers are terribly abused and subject to infection from coronavirus. As I work through all this, my diet may continue to change. The current limitations on grocery shopping, as I stay out of stores to avoid contagious fellow-shoppers, are also affecting my ability to choose.

Beyond taste, quality, and nutritiousness, many other concerns have taken on critical importance. Here are the issues that seem important to me now:

• Climate change has made us aware that some foods are very damaging to the long-term welfare of the earth. Clearing the rainforests of Brazil to graze more cattle can accelerate global warming. Clearing the mangrove swamps of southeast Asia to create shrimp farms is a disaster for the local and global environment (and these destroyed areas can only be used for a while but the environment is never restored). Raising cattle produces methane gas, some types of fertilizer poison the atmosphere, and so on. The term "carbon footprint" refers to the measurement of fossil fuel used to produce and deliver food products, and thus to estimate its impact on global warming.
• Extinction due to over-fishing has threatened many important species of food fish. Shoals of cod once seemed inexhaustible, but now the cod is nearly absent from former fishing grounds; similar fates await other species. Several organizations rate seafood to help us avoid buying and eating the most threatened types of fish. Extinction of land-based wild animals is also a result of some of the actions that threaten to speed up global warming.
• Cruelty to farmed animals motivates many people to avoid eating meat. The way this motive affects their choice of diet is varied, depending on whether they think all meat production is cruel or whether they think humane methods of cattle and poultry raising and slaughter are possible.
• Welfare of American agricultural workers and food-processing workers, especially the workers in meat-packing plants, is another major challenge in our society. Should we buy meat when the workers are abused, exploited, and relentlessly subject to infection with coronavirus?
• Welfare of workers in other countries presents a separate set of issues. Coffee, chocolate, sugar cane, bananas, shrimp on the Southeast Asian shrimp farms, and other imports are in many countries raised and processed with very troubling labor practices, including even slave labor.
• Food safety is a multi-faceted issue. Is it a small bright-spot that coronavirus is not thought to cause contaminated food? We all know about warnings that romaine lettuce and other vegetables grown in Arizona or California may harbor pathogenic bacteria. Over-use of pesticide and other agricultural chemicals may result in contamination, which is hard to assess. We have to worry that oversight by US government agencies of both home-grown and imported food is becoming more lax. Some people worry about genetic engineering, but the impact on one's health of GMOs in food has been shown to be inconsequential, especially in comparison to other food safety issues.
• Excessive processing of food has been a cause for concern for a long time. In my opinion, the healthfulness of highly processed foods seems somewhat less critical than other issues, because it only affects one's own personal health, not the welfare of the planet. That said, the corruption of US federal agencies by the current administration in Washington has more than ever favored the interests of big corporations over the interests of consumers and workers. So we may see the reintroduction of dangerous additives or careless food handling methods.
• Religious requirements play a role in food choices in many worldwide communities, and deserve a mention here. In Muslim countries: no pork. In India, cows are sacred to Hindus and thus not acknowledged as a food source. In my own family, the generations who preceded my parents chose food with one main motive: it had to follow the religious laws of being kosher. Unlike the rest of the items on the list, this is not a personal concern for me.

I'll be coming back to some of these issues in future blog posts! And I will link up with Marg at 

http://www.theintrepidreader.com/ 

Marg is the new host for Weekend Cooking, where bloggers share food-related posts from the previous week. This post and all posts on my blog are copyright © 2020 by Mae Sander for my blog, mae food dot blog spot dot com -- if you read this elsewhere it's been pirated!