What it means to lower your diets carbon footprint

Even though I live in northern BC I’ve always longed to be able to grow a fragrant lemon tree or a lush banana shrub or somehow get my Monstera deliciosa vine, that I grow as a houseplant, to grow big enough and produce the famed bread fruit.

So, when I saw the glossy leaves of a coffee plant, Coffea arabica, (see photo) growing happily in a pot in my local coffee shop I was captivated. The owners said they bought the plant at the nursery so I rushed off to get one too jokingly saying that maybe one day the plant would grow big enough, produce enough beans and I would never have too buy coffee again. This plant, I thought, could be another step on my way to eating locally and thus lowering my carbon footprint.

Eating locally is not a new concept, native indians have survived on a diet of moose, venison, rabbit,  trout, wild greens and berries for centuries. However, for the average person, who eats whatever is stocked on the shelves of the local supermarket, local food wether its found wild or farmed in local farms or grown in the backyard is an enigma. The difficulty of obtaining local food is documented in Alisa Smith and JB MacKinnon’s eye opening book, The 100 Mile Diet A year of local eating. They decided to embark on a one year project to see if local eating was possible and hoped in the process to lower their carbon footprint.

Mike Berners-Lee in his thought provoking book, How Bad Are Bananas?: The carbon footprint of everything, delves deeply into the question of what it means to reduce ones carbon footprint. He points out that buying tomatoes grown in a greenhouse a few miles away may on the surface sound great. But when you take into consideration that the greenhouse is heated with fossil fuels and the necessary grow lights are lit with fossil fuels and that the plants are grown with fertilizers made from fossil fuels you understand that buying bananas, grown in the tropics where heat and light from the sun is free, and the fossil fuels used to grow them are minimal and that transport by boat, uses the least amount of fossil fuels, (air transport uses the most followed by truck transport), eating bananas may in fact be a better idea.

Ever since I read this book I’ve been reevaluating my food choices. Of course eating with the seasons is still my number one consideration when choosing food. Food eaten in season tastes better because it is grown and ripened naturally outdoors, and is often cheaper and is easier to obtain locally.