Chapter 4: Watching What We Eat

Brian Halweil and Danielle Nierenberg


Among the many daily decisions we make, the one that has possibly the greatest impact on the environment is the food we choose to eat. Our collective demand as consumers influences how food is both raised and consumed. Our choices can support forms of agriculture that are destructive to human, ecological, and animal health—such as the factory farm approach to raising livestock—or they can support practices that are better for people, animals, and the planet.

The global food trade and the proliferation of processed foods have distanced us both geographically and psychologically from where our food is produced. In the industrialized world we pay a very large hidden price for the highly processed products and cheap fast food we have grown accustomed to. These social and environmental consequences include polluted streams and rivers, resistance to antibiotics, dramatically high rates of obesity, a breakdown of shared mealtimes, and the loss of jobs for small, local farmers.

There are ways, however, to reshape our food consumption to better protect the environment and human health. To start, we need a new set of standards for evaluating what is and isn’t healthy when it comes to food. In the industrialized world, we need to move beyond counting calories, and to look at whether our food was raised with pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics that harm our health and the environment.

The most profound changes “eaters” can make include eating less meat or eliminating it from their diet, supporting food produced without agrochemicals, and buying locally grown food. While eating is not a choice, we do have the right—and the responsibility—to choose how our food is produced. From shopping at a local farmers’ market to preparing meatless meals to buying fair-traded coffee and cocoa, small but growing groups of consumers all over the world are voting with their forks and their wallets to build a healthier food system.