Eating Less Energy

Of late I've turned vegetarian. Well, not a real vegetarian, but mostly. I've been following the simple mantra postulated by M. Pollan -- Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

Today with my cabbage salad I polished off the last remaining spring onion from my CSA box from the Fully Belly Farm, which I get once every other week. This is local, organic, in season, and 100% derived from plants, but importantly, it's food. I highlight the word food because we've migrated away from actually eating what had been considered food and more towards stuff like portable yogurt tubes, cup o' noodles, and Uncle Ben's non-stick rice.

There are so many benefits to this approach that it seems ludicrous that I allowed myself thirty odd years of anguish by eating non-foods:

• Far fewer fossil fuels are needed to just raise plants, rather than to raise plants to feed to animals to feed to us
• No plastic tubes need to be manufactured to contain my yogurt
• Far less water is needed to grow almonds and rice than to feed a pig
• Far less likelihood of heart disease, diverticulitis, and colon cancer
• Far smaller spare tire around my waist

I am a sucker for non-foods, however. I've been eating them my entire life, from quarter pounders as a kid to chicken nuggets as an adult, from Pepsi as a kid to diet A&W as an adult, from Cheeto's as a kid to Pringle's as an adult. To spend time to build a cabbage salad seems so arcane these days, what with microwave pizzas and TV dinners.

Why should I prepare my own food? Don't we live in a service economy? Shouldn't it be done for me instead of by me? I mean, I shouldn't ever have to mow my own lawn anymore, that chore has long ago been outsourced, so why shouldn't my food be the same?

The idea of eating less energy dovetails perfectly with my other personal goals of energy sustainability, sustainable transportation and just plain treading lightly. It just makes sense to me, and truthfully, I feel a whole lot better when I just eat food. I feel a whole lot better when I eat food grown locally, without pesticides, with less reliance on our massive subsidized trucking industry, with less reliance on petrochemical fertilizers, with less processing that strips all the nutrients out while spraying chemical substitutes back on them.

This just makes sense to me.