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By Megan Cohen
On Stuff Happens, Bill Nye tells you why it's greener to eat anchovies than to eat pigs who eat anchovies, but eating lower on the food chain is smart for more than just salty little fish. Mixing eco-friendly foods from the bottom of the chain into your daily diet can pay off for the planet, your wallet, your health, and your taste buds.
Eating low on the food chain is green because it conserves natural resources. The more steps there are between what comes out of the earth and what goes into your stomach, the more of planet Earth's capital gets used up in the process. When you're eating chicken, in terms of your environmental impact you might as well be eating all of the corn and grain that chicken ate, too. However, when you're eating an ear of corn directly, you're really just eating the corn. Cutting out the middleman, or the middle chicken in this case, saves water and land, reduces waste, and minimizes the fuel needed for farming.
However, just because eating low conserves resources doesn't necessarily mean you should only eat as low as you can, all the time, at every meal, no matter what. Ecological and species diversity is an important part of life on earth, and variety is the proverbial spice of life for an omnivore, so go ahead and roast up your Thanksgiving turkey, even though it'll take more environmental resources than roasting up a holiday carrot. From an environmental perspective, it's smart to try to build your meals from the bottom of the chain up, rather than from the top down, but you can still enjoy your favorite high-resource items. Try using lower foods as the building blocks of your meals, with higher foods as the embellishments.
The lowest foods are grains, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. The next level up includes small fish like shrimp, and Bill Nye's beloved anchovies, along with bugs if you're feeling... adventurous. At the next level up are bigger fish, poultry, and small animals like rabbit, then at the very top are the hefty classic meats like beef and pork.
When you're planning a dinner, think about simple ways to bring your meal a few steps down the food chain. Could you serve a smaller amount of beef than usual, but keep everyone's bellies and taste buds satisfied by nestling the steaks atop a bed of vibrantly colored mixed vegetables and aromatic wild rice? What about throwing some chicken into a soup or a stir-fry instead of serving whole broilers? By balancing meat with more eco-friendly elements at the table, you'll end up spending less of your household budget on food, taking on a lower-fat and more nutritionally varied diet, and helping to preserve the planet so that future generations can enjoy plenty of their own smart green meals.
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