Page 202 - How to Be a Conscious Eater - Making Food Choices That Are Good for You

46

WHAT TO MAKE OF CALORIES:

FOR THE PLANET

hen we talk about calories, it might seem like one of the
few times when it’s OK to be focused only on our own
Wwell-being, with not much to consider in the realm of
how it might affect others and the planet. Except: Producing
foods that don’t offer much nutritionally is not a very responsible use
of natural resources.
Around the world, we’ve got a billion hungry people at the
same time that we have a billion overweight and obese people.
The triple whammy is that one-third of all food produced is
lost or wasted. If we recovered just one-fourth of the food cur-
rently lost or wasted around the globe, we’d be able to feed all
those hungry people—and then some.
Whenever I hear the hyperbole about how on earth we’re
going to feed 10 billion people by 2050, I think about how much
food is also effectively wasted every time it’s put into highly
processed products that are objectively junk—empty calories,
as they’re also called. Corn isn’t inherently unhealthy; we
make it so by turning it into high-fructose corn syrup. Potatoes
aren’t inherently unhealthy; we make them so by frying them
in unhealthy fats and adding heaps of salt and other toppings.
And what happens to all the nutrient-filled skins? In other
words, the feeding-the-world issue is about how we use the
land we have to produce food, and how we use the food we
already produce. Consider, for example, that the same acre of
land can give us 250 pounds of beef or 30,000 pounds of carrots
or 50,000 pounds of tomatoes. That’s based on a still widely

Stuff that Comes from Factories 191

Conscious Eater_03 PT_4th patches.indd 191 10/23/19 1:35 PM