Eating our values

Like millions of others, both in Washington D.C. and across the nation, I watched with rapt attention yesterday to President Obama deliver his inaugural address.

It was an incredible speech. If there had been a "when Obama says something that should have been said long ago" drinking game, I'd have been legally barred from driving after about two paragraphs. One line, though, really caught my attention because it resonates so strongly with one of my pet issues:

And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

The issue is food: What we eat, where it comes from, and how we make it.

The reason that matters, as our society is slowly coming to understand, is that everything has a carbon footprint. Driving your car has a carbon footprint. Turning on your lights or running your dishwasher has a carbon footprint. And so does eating an apple or a slice of bacon.

Mark Bittman, whose career started as a New York Times columnist and cookbook author, has just branched out with a book called Food Matters, which is a look at the overall sustainability of the food system. He considers the numbers: how many people live on this planet, how many people are likely to eventually live on this planet, how much food this planet can produce, and perhaps most importantly, the carbon footprint of the food we currently eat.

Bittman shows--in numbers that really aren't disputed by anybody--that of everything we eat, meat has the highest carbon footprint.

This stands to reason: the cow we eat itself ate a diet of mostly corn, which was grown in the Midwest using all kinds of energy and petro-chemical fertilizers. Humans could have eaten that corn, but instead we took some of it and converted it into meat. But a cow does not turn a pound of corn into a pound of meat; it's more like 10 pounds of corn per pound of meat. It should be no surprise that meat has a large carbon footprint.

There is a moral dimension here as well, one that President Obama was getting at in his speech.

I don't mean whether it is moral to eat meat. I won't say we should all become vegetarians. I was a vegetarian for fifteen years of my life, but I'm not one anymore. I eat meat, and I enjoy it. I have no moral issues with being higher on the food chain than a cow, and frankly, cows are darned tasty.

But I do have a moral issue with consuming more meat than the planet can sustain. For me to enjoy a lifetime of delicious steaks, juicy burgers, crispy bacon, fried chicken, and all that other wonderful food while knowing that in doing so I am imposing an unfair burden of CO2 onto future generations, that's not moral.

That would be just as immoral as driving an SUV to work when I could ride my bike, or leaving all the lights on in my house on before going on vacation because I want the house to look occupied.

People look at a brownie or a cookie and say "a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips." There is an analogy there between the high carbon cost of meat and the amount of time that the resulting carbon dioxide is going to float around the Earth's metaphorical hips.

Some of Bittman's numbers are staggering, and you have to read the book to get the whole impact of them, but here's one conclusion that jumps out. Bittman estimates that, worldwide and in the long term, the sustainable amount of meat per person per day is probably no more than a couple of ounces. A mere eighth of a pound.

Forget about grabbing a quarter-pounder at Mickey-D's for lunch and hitting Taco Bell for a beef burrito on the way home. You want a big juicy T-bone steak? Fine, but that's your meat for a week.

The other dimension of food's carbon footprint is one that has nothing to do with eating meat-vs.-plants, but rather, has to do with transportation and processing. Michael Pollan, America's other leading food guru, has written extensively on the benefits local and unprocessed foods from a perspective of health, nutrition, and food security. I want to talk about it from the perspective of carbon.

I live in the Puget Sound. If I eat a strawberry during the month of June, that strawberry probably came from Washington (in fact, I know it did because I get them at the local farmer’s market). If I eat a strawberry in the month of December, that strawberry came from Mexico if I'm lucky or Argentina if I'm not. How much diesel fuel gets burned up shipping a strawberry half way around the world so I can have one in the dead of winter? I don't know the exact number, but then, it doesn't really matter. Whatever the amount, it carries moral cost.

If I get a snack-size bag of Doritos from the vending machine at work, that's 180 calories (it says so on the back), about the same as one ear of corn on the cob. But it took a lot of energy to process the corn into a handful of Doritos, put them in a little mylar baggie, and ship them from factory to warehouse to distributor and ultimately into that vending machine. Considerably more energy than it would have taken to grow the ear of corn and ship it to a supermarket. Energy equals carbon. There is a moral component to the decision to eat an ear of corn versus a bag of Doritos.

The lessons are simple: eat local food, and eat foods that are closer to their natural state. But those same lessons also reduce our carbon footprint. This makes following them not only healthy and tasty, but also moral. Responsible.

President Obama is right. The world has changed, and we must change with it. As our new President said yesterday:

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world.

One of those changes is to reform the way we eat, to feed our bodies while remaining mindful of the moral compass that gauges our stewardship of the planet we live on.