Environmental Advantages of Cooking with Non-Processed Food

Image source: http://www.slashfood.com/2011/03/24/u-s-food-industry-to-trim-packaging-waste-by-4-billion-pounds/.

Going along with July/August's theme of homemade or do-it-yourself food items that you might otherwise purchase processed, I thought I'd look into some of the environmental and related health reasons for decreasing prepackaged and preprocessed food consumption. Processing and packaging are obviously two separate things, but often go together with food choices.

While looking up the statistics mostly confirmed things that I had assumed (processed food requires more energy to produce than fresh food, since processed food re-constitutes fresh food, which takes energy), I was surprised by the portion of energy required for this stage, and it was good to remember how many stages there are to packaging and selling of processed food. For instance, think of the energy required to retail packaged food, which is completely separate from its production.

Advantages of cooking with non-processed foods:

Less energy used. Eating non-processed or packaged food can decrease food's carbon footprint because substantial energy is required to transform fresh food to the processed food found in a grocery store.

• According to the Earth Institute, "Growing food accounts for only one fifth of [the US food system's annual energy consumption]. The other four fifths is used to move, process, package, sell, and store food after it leaves the farm....While 21 percent of overall food system energy is used in agricultural production, another 14 percent goes to food transport, 16 percent to processing, 7 percent to packaging, 4 percent to food retailing, 7 percent to restaurants and caterers, and 32 percent to refrigeration and preparation." (As a side note, this is also a reason to each local food, as eating fresh food doesn't necessarily mean that less energy was spent on food transport.)
• Often the energy in the food is less than that required to produce it: "Processing breakfast cereals requires 7,125 kilocalories per pound—easily five times as much energy as is contained in the cereal itself" (from same Earth Institute article).
  

Decrease in chemical exposure. Due to the chemicals currently used in food packaging, the packaging itself can lead to environmental and animal and human health problems.

• A 2011 study found that food packaging (i.e. cans, wrappers, and polycarbonate bottles) is a substantial source of BPA exposure, which has been found to cause endocrine disruption in animals and in some human studies.
  
• As the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy explains, in addition to promoting packing materials without BPA, BPA exposure from food packaging can be lessened by cutting consumption of prepackaged foods and cooking form fresh ingredients.
  
• The IATP also shows an image from the article of the top 10 canned foods known to leach the most BPA, which I found slightly unnerving as coconut milk, the canned item I probably buy the most of, is at the top of the list.

So try to use non-packaged or non-processed foods whenever you can! More recipes coming on this theme during August.