Top 11 Sustainable Eating Tips + Earth-Friendly Recipes for a Healthier Planet
Learn the top 11 expert tips for sustainable eating and living a more eco-friendly lifestyle. Discover practical diet strategies and 10 delicious sustainable recipes to help reduce your environmental footprint.
Sustainable eating is one of the most impactful ways to support both personal health and the health of the planet. In this guide, you’ll discover my 11 expert-backed tips for building a more eco-friendly diet and adopting practical habits that promote a sustainable lifestyle. Plus, enjoy my 10 flavorful, planet-friendly recipes that make sustainable eating simple, delicious, and achievable every day.
What you choose to put on your plate can make the most powerful impact on your personal environmental footprint. At least three times a day you make choices on how to calm your growling belly and stoke your body with fuel—these choices can create a lighter impact on Mother Earth, or a heavier one. In the modern agricultural system, plant foods are grown with the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers and fossil fuels, which harm soils and promote monocultures. These plants are fed to animals, which are often concentrated on farms where their manures are concentrated, thus contaminating soils, waterways, and air. To top it off, food often travels long distances to get to our plates, and we waste up to 40% of all food we produce. How can you change all of that? Start out by checking out my 10 tips for sustainable eating.
Top 11 Tips for Sustainable Eating
1. Reduce Intake of Highly Processed Foods
If a food product has been through many steps in manufacturing, with lots of ingredients coming from all corners of the world, the carbon footprint is higher for that product, due to traveling, manufacturing, and distribution. Think a nutrition bar with a long list of ingredients vs. a handful of nuts, which came from one source with minimal processing.
2. Choose More Nutrient-Rich Foods
Nutrient-rich foods, such as whole grains, beans, vegetables, and fruits, are more sustainable because they use resources—water, farm inputs, soil—wisely to produce foods that contribute to good health. In contrast, using these precious resources to produce foods with poor nutritional quality (i.e., soda, chips, candy) is not sustainable, because you squander resources that could have been used to produce foods that nourish the body.
3. Eat in Balance With Your Body
The concept of eating enough calories (energy) to support a healthy weight is a very important way to stay in balance with the health of the planet, as well as your personal health. That’s because consuming food in excess of the calories we need wastes the resources required to produce food. America produces far more calories in our food supply than we need for daily subsistence.
4. Avoid Purchasing Fresh Foods Out of Season
Foods that travel long distances are not typically sustainable. When you purchase fruits in the winter from far away countries that are flown in by air, the environmental impact is high. However, keep in mind that some places are more efficient at growing things even if they are a bit farther away. For example, California’s climate may make some produce a more sustainable option than buying produce that was grown in a heated greenhouse.
5. Use Preserved Foods in the Off Season
Preserved foods that are lightly processed, such as canned, dried, and frozen, are more sustainable options during the off season, compared to produce that is grown in heated greenhouses or shipped in from far away places (air transport is the worst). Preservation of foods is a practice that humans have been following through the eons as a means of survival.
6. Consider Organic Foods
Organic food regulations significantly limit the synthetic pesticides that can be used in crop production, and they support more sustainable soil practices, such as the use of cover crops, composting, and manures.
7. Reduce Food Packaging
Food packages (cereal boxes, produce clam shells, individual cups) can make a huge impact on sustainability, as packaging fills up landfills and leaches chemicals into the ecosystem. Select more minimally processed whole foods with little packaging as your best bet. After all, a banana and a sweet potato have natural packaging.
8. Trim Food Waste
Food waste is a significant factor in sustainability, because 30-40% of all food produced in the U.S. is never eaten. Unfortunately, we use vast resources—soil, water, fossil fuels, crop inputs—to produce food that is never eaten. Food waste primarily occurs at the consumer level, where people can make a difference.
9. Limit Your Number of Food Shopping Trips
Studies show that traveling to buy groceries may be very impactful in the total number of miles foods travel to get to your plate. So try limiting the number of trips you make, and condense your food travel trips to take advantage of your location. For example, if you’re headed to the farmers market, do all of your food-related trips in that nearby location for the week. And remember that food miles—the number of miles food travels to get to your plate—is an important part of sustainability, but the production of food has a potentially larger impact on sustainability.
10. Reduce Meat Consumption
Research consistently shows that animal foods have a much larger carbon, land, and water footprint than plant foods. A main reason is because in today’s modern agriculture, we grow plants to feed animals, which are inefficient converters of plants into food. We could cut out the middleman (animals) and eat those plants directly.
11. Grow Some of Your Own Food
One of the most sustainable things you can ever do is to start a garden—even starting with one pot on your patio. No food miles, no packaging, no fossil fuels, plus the joy of spending time in the soil with living breathing plants under the glorious sun. What could be more sustainable than that?
Learn More About Sustainable Eating
If You Grow It, You Will Eat It
6 Ways to Cut Your Food Waste
Top 5 Tips for Greening Your Plate
Making Local Foods Affordable
A Climate-Friendly Diet
Sharon’s Top 10 Earth-Friendly Recipes
More Tools for Eating and Living the Goodness
