Jane Powerson eating too much.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that we waste about a third of our food and that the creation and disposal of these uneaten edibles take an unnecessary toll on the planet. But many of us also practise another kind of food extravagance.
We are, quite simply, eating too much, too often and too processed. I hold my hand up and admit that I'm a demon for certain unwholesome foods. So I'd like to remind myself (and anyone else who might be listening) that the more processed our diet, the more it uses up the earth's resources.
Let's take the frozen oven chip - or, rather, the potato that spawned it: trucked from farm to factory, washed and cut and cooked and frozen, then transported from factory to warehouse to supermarket (all at subzero temperatures) and, eventually, to our home freezers and into our ovens. Even before we consider the fat, salt and incongruous additives (rice starch, anyone?), our chips have eaten up a pot of fossil fuels and emitted a bellyful of greenhouse gases.
The same could be said for most processed foods. Not only do they consume an undue amount of the earth's resources, they also contain ingredients to keep them from separating, rotting, discolouring, caking, desiccating and foaming and to make them bulkier, firmer, sweeter and more colourful. None of these additives is a substance we would ever use in our kitchens. ("Pass the polydimethylsiloxane, please"?) And we don't need them in our dinner if we eat fresh or traditionally preserved food (dried or pickled, for instance). The American author Michael Pollan, who wrote the excellent Omnivore's Dilemma, advises wisely: "Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognise as food."
Pollan partially attributes the US's problem with obesity and other diet-related illnesses to the fact that, unlike France, Greece, Japan and other healthier nations, it has no centuries-old national cuisine.
We are a bit like the Americans: without a long-established and venerable food culture, and often without a mechanism (either in the meal or in our eating psyche) that says: "Stop, that's enough."
Indeed, as the dietician Elmary Purtill points out: "People feel it's a shame to 'waste good food', so they eat what's on the plate, even if the portion is huge."
But most of us now live lives in which food is more plentiful than ever, and heavy portions are not doing anyone, or our planet, any favours. After all, a lighter and healthier population is less of a burden on the earth's resources.