Food4Good - Renewable

Standing in the aisle of a grocery store you can pretty quickly figure out the cost, nutritional value, or ingredients of an item of food you’re holding in your hand. Worst case scenario, it’s probably a quick search away. But when it comes to the question of the sustainability of a food product, getting an answer as clear as calories or price tag is just about impossible.

In this episode of Renewable, we sat down with Ashley Bouchard to discuss the Food4Good project — a bold initiative of the Jasper Place Wellness Centre that seeks to make sure every resident of the community it serves has access to healthy, affordable food. Food4Good is a project concerned with food justice and security, but it also evokes questions of sustainability. When people can only afford packaged and fast foods, they’re inherently choosing foods with a higher carbon footprint.

But food sustainability — even in this simple example — is a much more complex subject. In short, it’s not just about the food.

First, there’s the question of farming practices. In order for farmers to be able to survive, food production needs to be profitable. This means that the shift to sustainable farming should try to maintain or increase output while addressing environmental demands.

How is this done? The current wisdom argues that if we understand the ecosystem in which we’re farming, we can better understand what grows naturally there, reducing the need for intervention and making farming more sustainable in terms of both the economics and the environmental impact. Do this, and you can maintain yields while avoiding monocrops, keeping soil fertile, and protecting biodiversity.

Then there’s a question of what you’re feeding your food. In trying to calculate the emissions of a single food product, you have to account for the energy that goes into each calorie of that food. For an animal product for example, that’s not just the land they graze on and the food they eat, but the energy that went into producing the food they eat in the first place. For plant products, it’s a complex balance of the water and nutrient requirements and the seasonal demands of the crop.

These two spheres alone — land and crop choices and basic farming supply chains — raises a whole subset of other issues, including animal welfare, employment practices, and public health.

Which brings us back to that aisle. Trying to tally up and compare the emissions between two similar products is vastly more difficult than letting sustainability instruct the choice of the kinds of food you choose in the first place. Rather than trying to reverse engineer an entire supply chain when choosing between two cuts of chicken, there are simple rules you can follow to reduce emissions immediately:

1. Reduce your intake of meat, fish, and dairy (foods with generally the highest emissions) and spend the difference on sustainably grown produce.
2. Choose foods that are in season.
3. Reduce food waste both in terms of packaging and buying things you don’t need (or won’t finish eating before it goes bad) and will inevitably throw out.

Letting these basic rules instruct conscious choices can help drastically reduce your food footprint without turning a trip to the grocery store into a research paper. It’s important that people understand what goes into making food sustainable, but when it comes down to that all important moment of decision, these simple guidelines can help point you in the right direction.

And if you’re interested in making sure that communities in Edmonton can afford to make healthy, sustainable food choices, you can support initiatives like the Jasper Place Wellness Centre’s Food4Good program, the subject of this episode of Renewable.

Renewable is a series about visionaries, creators, community leaders and above all else, Edmontonians, each with a unique vision of a sustainable future in the heart of Canada’s fossil fuel industry.

For more information, visit edmonton.ca/RenewableSeries.