“Knowing where your food comes from can change your life.”
—Alice Waters
I wrote this book for my children.
As a dietitian with a successful corporate wellness practice, I had worked with thousands of people to help them lose weight, manage chronic disease, and improve their health through diet. I loved staying abreast of the latest clinical research on food findings, and then helping my clients incorporate the newest proven strategies or foods for effectively managing weight, fighting disease, and feeding their families soundly, while helping companies better manage their spiraling health-care costs.
Then I had children, and my world changed. Suddenly the issue of global health, always important but somehow easy to nudge into the backseat of day-to-day life, took on a clearer focus. In fact, there was an exact moment when I knew I was going to write this book. I refer to it as “my PB&J moment.”
It was the summer of 2007, and I was at the playground with my kids and several other moms and tots. After about an hour, we all pulled out snacks. I watched with fascination as one mom pulled out a premade, frozen, prepackaged, crustless PB&J on white bread, cut neatly into a little white circle and prewrapped in a clear plastic package. It was a little diskette of technology, convenience, and “food product” for a little boy to snack on.
In truth, this particular mom, like all of us, was only trying to do the best thing for her kids while balancing a time-strapped reality. And up until that moment, I had been equally guilty in other ways, such as breezily making suggestions to clients to load up on single- serving, pre-portioned (which meant calorie-controlled) items as a dieter’s manna from Skinny Heaven.
But here’s a rundown of what went through my head at that moment:
This “PB&J moment” got me thinking deeply over the next couple of days about the connection between the grocery aisle and Antarctica’s glaciers. Could it be a lot closer than we realize? I decided to investigate further to see if I could make some different suggestions to clients to help them eat in a greener way.
And what I found appalled me.
The American diet is warming the planet.
Americans’ food choices are a significant driver of the global warming crisis.
Yes, it is our food choices, and all of the energy that it takes to give us these choices (including production, transport, processing, packaging, storage, and preparation), that is now the single largest contributor to global warming, eclipsing even our love affair with our SUVs. The average American diet creates 2.8 tons of CO2 emissions each year per person, which has now surpassed the 2.2 tons generated by Americans driving.1
The impact of these choices is now echoing around the globe, not just because our food is nowadays logging more frequent-flier miles than we are, with blueberries from Argentina and grapes from Chile, but because throughout the whole system of food production, from when it is produced to when we put it in our mouths, the amount of fossil fuel going into our food choices has outstripped the actual amount of energy in the food itself. Even something as seemingly innocuous as lettuce can require a river of petroleum to bring it to diners’ plates; the average head of lettuce grown in California and picked at the peak of ripeness ends up requiring nearly 60 calories of fossil fuel for every food calorie by the time it arrives on a diner’s plate in New York City.2 This is to say nothing of the thousands of highly processed foods that require barrels of oil to create but provide little return in terms of real nutrition.
So thus begins a new chapter in the diet debate. Your food choices not only determine the current (and future) state of your health and weight but are also a significant portion of your overall carbon footprint that will affect future generations. And the typical American diet has the global impact of a Hummer. Further, that same diet is clogging their arteries, fattening their waistlines, and wreaking havoc on their immune systems.
The good news is that you can enjoy health, flavor, and a genuine excitement for food while cutting your carbon footprint. You do not have to subsist on reconstituted gruel and local twigs in order to trim the amount of fossil fuel on your plate. In fact, I was inspired to create this eating plan precisely because it is easy, is doable, and can have significant health and carbon impacts now; you will lose weight and lighten your carbon load at the same time. Believe me, as someone living high in the Wasatch Mountains in Utah, if anyone was scared about the “pleasure” implications of cutting a carbon footprint (did I mention I am a foodie obsessed with authentic ingredients such as prosciutto di Parma from Parma, Italy?), it was me.
So here’s how it works.
You will enjoy a variety of fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, and grains.
You will eat at a better spot on the food chain, one that cuts your waist and your waste (and you’ll still get to enjoy that steak once in a while).
You’ll live a bit more like a locavore (eating more local and seasonal food) when your area’s growing season allows it.
You’ll realign your relationship with industrial food.
You will move your kids from “food products” back to real food in a way that’s easy, tasty, and still fun.
You’ll still get to savor dessert and alcohol in moderation.
While doing all this, you will also significantly cut your carbon impact. In fact, what makes this book unique is that you can use it not only as a diet book, but also as a guide to actively green up your diet and cut greenhouse gases associated with your food choices.
So that is the genesis for this book. And I hope you will join me. While the global warming crisis is admittedly complicated, with many far-reaching tentacles that need to be sorted out, one of the largest, most significant tentacles (our food system) has a clear, easy, and immediate solution. And the best part is that adapting the diet plan in this book can help you slim down, lean up, and dramatically reduce your odds of many chronic diseases, including the leading killers of heart disease and diabetes. If you have children, it will help them change course from being what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has warned could be “the first generation not to outlive their parents” to healthy, nourished eaters who enjoy real food instead of the “food product” that seems to have overtaken their lunch boxes and their lives.
Only action creates results. I implore you to join me in this “lean and green” revolution that will help you lose weight, cut your risk of disease, and significantly cut your carbon footprint now.
I think our children would be proud of us.