How to Be a Conscious Eater

46

WHAT TO MAKE OF CALORIES:

FOR THE PLANET

W

hen we talk about calories, it might seem like one of the

few times when it’s OK to be focused only on our own

well-being, with not much to consider in the realm of

how it might affect others and the planet. Except: Producing

foods that don’t offer much nutritionally is not a very responsible use

of natural resources.

Around the world, we’ve got a billion hungry people at the

same time that we have a billion overweight and obese people.

The triple whammy is that one-third of all food produced is

lost or wasted. If we recovered just one-fourth of the food cur-

rently lost or wasted around the globe, we’d be able to feed all

those hungry people—and then some.

Whenever I hear the hyperbole about how on earth we’re

going to feed 10 billion people by 2050, I think about how much

food is also effectively wasted every time it’s put into highly

processed products that are objectively junk—empty calories,

as they’re also called. Corn isn’t inherently unhealthy; we

make it so by turning it into high-fructose corn syrup. Potatoes

aren’t inherently unhealthy; we make them so by frying them

in unhealthy fats and adding heaps of salt and other toppings.

And what happens to all the nutrient-filled skins? In other

words, the feeding-the-world issue is about how we use the

land we have to produce food, and how we use the food we

already produce. Consider, for example, that the same acre of

land can give us 250 pounds of beef or 30,000 pounds of carrots

or 50,000 pounds of tomatoes. That’s based on a still widely

Stuff that Comes from Factories 191

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