- Grow your own food. Urban gardening fosters community, reduces waste, cleans the air and provides fresh food.
- Buy organic. Nitrogen runoff from fertilizers destroy entire aquatic ecosystems while pesticides destroy biodiversity; Organic agriculture can remove 7,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per acre every year.
- Buy local. An average food item in the US travels 1,500 miles.
- Buy Fair Trade. Hundreds of thousands of children work as slaves in cocoa, coffee and other plantations; if an item cannot be produced in your area buy products that respect not only the environment but also the people who produced it.
- Eat fresh whole food. Post-production (processing, packaging, transportation, storage and retail) accounts for 80-90% of the food system’s fuel usage.
- Avoid eating meat. If you must, make sure it is grass fed and pasture raised. One third (1/3) of the world’s harvested cropland grows feed and forage for animals in CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations).
- Know your fish. Most of our fish stock is at risk of extinction. If you buy wild fish make sure that is MSC (Marine Stewardship Council) certified or, if farmed, choose fish thaty is low on the food chain – meaning vegetarian ones such as tilapia and catfish.
- Re(cycle) Energy and Nutrients. Waste=food, compost your kitchen scraps and fertilize your plants with it.