Diet Culture For A Small Planet

The contradictions of eating well and good

Hey friends. I’m curious. What don’t you eat?

a nice salad

If you think much about climate change, you probably have given some consideration to your diet. Food and land use are a key component of human impact on the planet.

Drawdown graphic shows how “food, agriculture and land use” account for a quarter of all carbon, while other land, like forests, absorbs a quarter of the carbon we produce. If we ate differently, especially less beef and dairy, and farmed differently, we could produce less carbon and store more.

And, eating and cooking are a huge dimension of parenting, especially for mothers, as

Virginia Sole-Smith

writes about so astutely. More generally, in our affluent, consumer-driven, individualistic society, food is a set of choices you make three or more times every day that telegraphs something complex and subtle about who you are (if you have the means to exercise choice, that is).

For me, my concern for the Earth began in some ways with a diet conversion. My father had a best friend growing up in Baltimore, Marc, who later moved to San Francisco, became a doctor and a Buddhist (I’m not sure in what order). When I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, he visited us in Baton Rouge and brought me a pamplet based on the book Diet for a Small Planet, by Frances Moore Lappé.

I’m pretty sure he did this to piss off my dad. And it worked.

This pamphlet changed my life. It explained how beef production was destroying the Amazon rainforest, a place I already cared about; around this time, I had “adopted” an acre of the forest in Belize, and was rewarded with a poster I hung on my bedroom wall, featuring the most beautiful and charismatic animals of that habitat, starring the golden lion tamarin.

Man, I loved that monkey.

my baby

That pamphlet was a click moment that helped me understand for the first time how my personal, private everyday choices were connected to massive forces warping the planet. And importantly, the pamphlet said I could do something about it—I could stop eating meat.

In South Louisiana, vegetarianism set me radically apart. I was asked to explain myself almost every time I sat down at a table—which meant many, many conversations about animal welfare, topsoil loss, water use. People often did not react well to an air of moral superiority or hearing a bunch of factoids from a nerdy kid, say at Grandma’s house on Christmas, at crawfish boils, at the state fair, at parties, at summer camp, where the “vegetarian option” at lunch was often an onion ring sandwich with a slice of American cheese.

Vegetarianism cut me off from some people and ideas; it connected me to others. My mother, very smartly, said that if I wanted to change the family menu, I should start contributing to it. I got a copy of Moosewood Cookbook, igniting a lifelong love of both cooking and ‘70s hippiedom. I idolized Joni Mitchell and the late Beatles, started going to yoga class with my mom, affected Birkenstocks and thrift-store jeans.

There’s another layer to my vegetarianism that I wasn’t as aware of at the time. As a pubescent girl coping with the truly egregious fatshaming culture of the ‘90s, I’d found a way to eat “lighter” and more virtuously without overtly identifying as a dieter.

I remained a vegetarian through college. And then, gradually, things shifted. At some point in my early 20s, under the influence of my now-husband, I started eating seafood. On trips home to Louisiana, I happily devoured seemingly all the crabs, crawfish, catfish, shrimp, and oysters I had missed growing up, reconnecting with a place I’d never felt fully at home but now missed fiercely.

Later, when I was pregnant and anemic, I enjoyed a few burgers and let occasional strips of bacon or pork buns back into my life.

These days, I’d say I’m 85% vegetarian. I almost never eat beef, but I’ll slurp a soup dumpling when we get takeout a few times a month. I cook dinner for the family, and the menu is usually vegetarian. On Friday nights I roast a chicken, which usually comes from our farm. I have both dairy and nondairy milk and butter in my fridge, and I’m always trying to buy organic, local, pastured, free-range, farmer’s market, CSA, whole grain, rescued, fermented, recycled-packaging…

Basically, a fridge full of morally correct, plant-forward, virtue-signaling foodstuffs. Unlike in Baton Rouge in the ‘90s, when my food choices were rebellious and countercultural, I’m now fully in conformance with my psychodemographic of a well-off educated white woman in gentrified Brooklyn.

And—we all love going out for ice cream, and I buy the little one Goldfish and Pirate Booty for her lunch because we never had that stuff growing up and it makes me feel generous and like a good caregiver to have a “snack drawer” in the pantry, and I always get Pringles and a 20oz Diet Dr. Pepper on road trips.

I really connected with what food writer

Greta Caruso

wrote in New York Magazine recently:

“Food is a source of pleasure and community for me, obviously, but it’s also a major source of moral tension…It’s hard because food is so emotional. We buy the brands our parents bought when we were kids, sitting in the grocery cart. We eat the things that make us feel good because life is hard enough and comfort food works.

Climate change is palpably upon us, but adjusting our diets to decrease our climate footprint often feels too small to be worth the effort. We know that February strawberries travel thousands of miles to New York and are picked by employees that are treated terribly, but toddlers love berries and dissatisfied toddlers are scary. And finally, maintaining a commitment to “good, clean, and fair” food isn’t just inconvenient and prohibitively expensive, it can also be — as much as I hate to say it — downright annoying.”

The chart below shows that eating less beef and lamb is by far the single most impactful choice you can make. “75% of all agricultural land is used for grazing animals or growing animal feed.”

But cheese, chocolate and coffee are also pretty high on the hog (higher, in fact, than hog), which sucks for me, because I consume them all pretty much every day. I’ve been buying less cheese since the beginning of the year, and looking for better chocolate alternatives.

I’m a little surprised to admit it, because typically, in this newsletter, I tack the other way.

What's Wrong With Showing Your Kids Paradise?

But I think continuously adjusting your diet in some way to decrease your climate footprint is NOT too small to be worth the effort. I think it’s worth doing, even if it’s uncomfortable and at times annoying.

Not because your lunch or mine is going to save the planet. Not because there’s one right way to eat. Not because there isn’t a whole host of dangers and pitfalls in tying some kind of morality or righteousness to our eating habits.

But because, as I discovered back as a kid in the ‘90s, food connects us to ideas and to other people. It’s a daily, personal practice of conscious decisionmaking. It’s a major component of how we pass on not only culture, but values to our kids. And, because our food choices can start good conversations.

Some links

I’m teaching a class with the inestimable

Jay Michaelson

(you should read his Substack): The Wheel Of Climate Emotions.

On Tuesday, May 7th, 2024, we invite you to explore the wheel of climate emotions (based on the pioneering work of Panu Pihkala) and how we as Buddhists, meditators, and engaged citizens can work with it skillfully.

In conversation and in meditation, we’ll explore noticing and accommodating our emotions, building resilience, and working with the energies of these emotions in the body.

This program is available both online or in-person in Manhattan, New York. Click for more info and to reserve your spot!

https://www.nyimc.org/event/the-wheel-of-climate-emotions/