2. I pledge to purchase more raw and bulk foods and fewer processed foods + drinks.
WHY?
YOU: Foods in their most natural states or slightly cooked offer the greatest nutrition. Avoiding trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, excessive sugar and salt and artificial sweeteners, colors and flavorings is crucial to long term health.
Pardon the French, but there is SO MUCH CRAP in food these days. If you don't read the labels and know what to look for, you're playing roulette with your health. Your best bet is to reduce the amount of packaged and processed foods and then, with those you choose to keep, look first at organic varieties. They tend to weed out a bunch of the garbage, but you still need to read the labels because the junk still sneaks in.
Avoid the following ingredients at all costs. Remember the FDA has allowed all of these harmful ingredients into our food. Why? Because they are good for industry profit, not your health.
Does it concern you that restaurants are not required to disclose which ingredients they've used or put into their food for you to eat? Imagine if grocery store items had no labels and you just chose what to eat based on what sounded good or what happened to be the daily special? Do you think most chefs and cooks are more concerned with taste of their food or your nutritional benefit?
WALLET: Packaged and prepared foods as well as boutique drinks are costly. The less packaging, the less the company is passing that expense on to you.
Plastic cups, plastic lids, plastic bottles, glass bottles, straws, styrofoam boxes, clam shell plastic boxes, plastic bags, plastic utensils, paper napkins, plastic cups, plastic wrappers, cardboard boxes...all items you purchase and then dispose. Buy in bulk and buy raw...less packaging or no packaging. Recycle and reuse what you can, but first reduce the amount of packaging all together that you purchase.
Do you really need to put those bananas in a plastic produce bag? Have those peels stopped working? For that matter, why bag lettuce, apples and peppers? Do you think your produce is going to "stay clean" from grocery to home when it's already been handled by who-knows-how-many-people already in picking, cleaning, packing, transporting and shelving?
It's less than clean at the store. A little naked ride in the buggy and then car isn't going to make things worse. Leave the produce bags at the store. Or use
re-useable cloth produce bags.
And if you're not using re-useable grocery store bags, let me know. I have a few extra 100 in my trunk. Isn't EVERYONE selling these now? Are they the new plastic water bottle? Ten years from now, we'll be drowning in re-useable grocery bags and they'll be filling the landfills because people have bought them and forgotten to use them so they buy more! Choose biodegradable cloth bags for this very reason.
PLANET: The fewer the ingredients, the less transportation and production pollution.
Keep it simple - for your health and for the planet. The more complex the food, the more resources have been tapped. Apples: tree, crate, truck, store (ideally). Apple Sauce: peel, core and mash the apples trucked from the farm, input additives purchased from alternate locations (sugar, preservative, etc.), fill glass jars purchased and trucked from another source, seal and label jar, box, and ship out. And apple sauce isn't even that complicated of a product.
Invest in a food processor and do the processing at home. Not only will you reduce the overall resource demand in buying prepared and packaged food, you will be able to control exactly what goes into your creation.
Live Light, xo-C.
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