Eating ‘Green’: 7 Tips for Sustainable Grocery Shopping
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It’s officially summer, so with this glorious time of fresh produce and farmer’s markets I wanted to take a deeper dive into sustainable grocery shopping. You may have never thought about sustainability with buying groceries or be an avid farmer’s market goer already, but no matter where you’re at on your sustainable food journey, I’m here to help!
I want to note I’m no expert when it comes to food, but I am a realistic optimist. This means I see both the science and emotion behind food. I get it that you don’t have time to grow all your food (talk about a work of love), but I also see that we need to be more informed on what we’re consuming and how we do it. I had too much to say on this subject, so I will be publishing a second blog post later this month on frequently asked questions about sustainable food like, does eating less meat help the environment? and what does local food mean?, so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, I wanted to give you hands-on tips for sustainable grocery shopping, so you can eat ‘green’! Try one tip this month and let me know how it goes!
Make a Grocery List
32% of food is wasted in the average US household which is a hard statistic ‘to swallow’ (source). Incredibly, making a habit as simple as a grocery list can help! This routine reduces trips to the store, helps avoid buying duplicates of what you already have, and is a motivation to meal prep. You can make a list on your phone or Bea Johnson, aka Mother of Zero Waste Living, puts a recycled piece of paper on the fridge, so the whole family can contribute throughout the week. She makes the list starting from the bottom of the paper and rips it off before heading on her weekly grocery run. It’s also useful to have a dedicated day of the week for grocery shopping, so you can find a pattern in how much you need and have a deadline for making decisions on meal prep.
2. Buy in Bulk
You may think of Sam’s Club or Costco when I say bulk, but these places aren’t the best idea for bulk grocery shopping. The products are commonly swathed in packaging and depending on the product it results in food waste as it’s bad by the time you make it to the bottom. The bulk that’s truly effective is where you can choose the amount you need from a larger container. This way the store can be in charge of inventory instead of your cupboard! A simplified cupboard also helps you avoid the uh oh, when you pull out a package of stale food hidden in the back or buying duplicates. You can check to see if you have a bulk store in your area by going to litterless.com.
Don’t have a bulk food store in your area? Consider an idea such as buying bulk from a specialty store like ice cream. Bring in your own large container, ask for it to be filled, and you’ll be surprised at how many places will say yes if you’re confident! You could also head to your local brewery and fill up a growler instead of buying individually packaged bottles if you’re hosting an event with alcohol. A great tip I learned from Bea Johnson’s book, Zero Waste Home, is to buy bulk produce at the end of its season as it will be the cheapest price and can or freeze it.
3. Bring Reusable Shopping Supplies
Reusable shopping bags are everywhere now, but how many do you have and use? If you’re like me, you have way too many. Consider reducing how many bags you have and refusing the next free one that’s offered to you at an event or giveaway. We want quality not quantity! I also recommend watching this interesting video from SciShow evaluating the lifecycle of different bags to determine which material is the most sustainable. You may be surprised at what they found like I was!
There are numerous other impactful actions you can do for sustainable grocery shopping. You can use mesh produce bags (see below) in place of the plastic ones at the store. These bags are growing in popularity to make homemade if you like to crochet! You can additionally substitute jars for spices, flour, and sugar and grain bags for rice, quinoa, and more. Bea Johnson uses a washable crayon to mark the tare weight on her jars and bags (can you tell I love her book, Zero Waste Home??) and a pillowcase for her weekly bread supply from the local bakery. Consider bringing your own sealable container to a deli for meat or a beeswax wrap for cheese. The breathable fabric of the beeswax wrap is great for cheese! Don’t have a beeswax wrap? Check out Jenny Joy Soaps who I partner with for my DIY Beeswax Wrap workshops because of her amazing pre-mixed beeswax bars made from her bees and pine trees in Arizona.
4. Buy In-season Produce
We are spoiled in the United States to be able to eat fresh produce all year-round at affordable prices, but I wondered at what cost? Research done by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture found that conventional food brought into Iowa (this includes imports) produces 5-17 times more carbon dioxide and costs 4-17 times more compared to local food. This comes from the high price of transportation and energy to avoid spoilage which may only increase due to the rising prices of oil and gas. This research shows a clear financial and environmental gain to eating local.
I also looked into the toxicity of common methods for avoiding spoilage including pumping gases into reefer containers, refrigeration, and washing produce with chlorine-treated water post-harvest. The company Apeel makes an edible food coating out of plant-derived materials to decelerate decay. I haven’t found these tactics to be harmful if you wash your produce, but I’d like to learn more in the future.
I’ve recently been working on buying less produce out-of-season, and I’ve found I have become more connected with where my food comes from as well as get more excited for the times when produce is in-season. It simplifies our diet while still having variety throughout the year. Canning and freezing also allows me to still eat produce in the winter, so I’m going to work on doing it more!
5. Know Your Farmer
An impactful action we can take is to get to know who is producing our food. I’ve found it’s not as clear cut as buying from an organic or non-organic farmer as certain conventional farmers do their best to work within their means. There’s a variety of resources to meet farmers including your local farmer’s market, CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture), cooperatives, and local food hubs. Local food hubs are organizations who help distribute and/or market food for small and mid-sized farmers. If you live in Iowa, you can check out Iowa State Extension’s resource for farmer’s markets, CSAs, local food hubs, and local food directories here. Practical Farmers of Iowa also has a directory of their members if you’re interested.
6. Buy Specific Organic Produce
Organic food has become more popular in recent decades with restrictions on pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and artificial treatments. These practices come at an extra cost of 10-20% depending on what you buy and where, so I wanted to know if it’s worth it to buy all organic produce. Consumer Reports in 2020 conducted an extensive analysis of 35 types of organic and non-organic produce tested for over 450 pesticides by the USDA to see what risks of pesticide residue they posed. They created their own rating system according to multiple factors such as how often the pesticide appeared on samples, how many pesticides, and what pesticides appeared. Consumer Reports found that less than half of non-organic produce poses little threat to our health, but 20% earned the lowest score such as peaches, green beans, and cherries. Interestingly, spinach was rated poor in both organic and non-organic categories! The Environmental Working Group (EWG) also does tests on a variety of produce annually to create their Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen lists to educate consumers. These resources have convinced me to look at growing or buying specific organic produce for our family, but ultimately, it’s your personal choice for buying organic versus non-organic.
7. Buy Less Meat
I eat meat regularly, so I was interested to see if the trending question, “Does eating less meat help the environment?”, was true. Project Drawdown is a cool company researching the most impactful solutions to climate change. They have an ongoing list of the top 100 solutions, and you’ll never believe it, but a plant-rich diet was rated as the third most impactful! They did a future projection testing scenarios if 50% or 75% of the world’s population switched to a plant-rich diet by 2050, that it would reduce 78-103 gigatons of carbon dioxide. To give you a comparison, Project Drawdown predicts electric cars to reduce 7.7-9.8 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050. The massive reduction in carbon dioxide is due to the decrease in greenhouse emissions, land clearing, and fertilizers to produce meat versus plants. I also found this video by AsapScience was helpful in explaining this topic.
This said, meat has health benefits such as iron, protein, and zinc which can be hard to replace with plants, so I want to start by limiting my meat intake to 1 meal a day and one day a week without any meat. Consider it Lent with meatless Fridays all-year round. 😊 I also want to buy less red meat as it’s shown to increase your risk of heart disease, diabetes, and premature death, and buy local meat, so I can know the farmer’s practices. It’s all about balance, so I will gradually adopt a more plant-rich diet. Want to join me??
There you have it, 7 tips to sustainable grocery shopping! Ultimately, it comes down to your values and budget for how you want to spend money on groceries, but I hope these tips lead you to new ideas and more informed decisions about the subject.
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