Whether you refuse to eat anything that wasn’t grown in dirt or you’re the total embodiment of stalwart carnivore Ron Swanson of TV’s “Parks and Recreation,” you have a belief system about food. Even if you don’t realize it, every time you chow down, you are taking a stand. In order to be a responsible citizen of our planet, it is your responsibility to make sure your food choices are as informed as they can be.
The decision of what to eat requires careful balance and deliberation. Someone who participates in Meatless Mondays may do so because he knows that it requires over 1,000 gallons of water to produce his hamburger and he wants to conserve our planet’s dwindling resources. Likewise, a vegan may spend more to fill her plate with costly, locally grown vegetables because she knows they are more nutritious and come with a lower carbon footprint than imported pesticide-laden veggies. An omnivore might only choose to eat free-range chicken because they have read about the torturous lives of factory-farmed animals.
In all these cases, people are choosing to support the farms and distribution systems that they believe, based on their own moral codes, are making the world a better place. Frankly, it doesn’t matter what decisions they make. What matters is that they are making informed decisions. If you don’t think twice about the food on your plate, you could be unwittingly supporting industries that destroy rain forest ecosystems, use dangerous chemicals or torture animals.
As a Binghamton University student, it’s hard enough to balance your workload and social life. Researching your food is an additional stressor, yet an important responsibility. Unfortunately, this information isn’t always readily available.
Searching the Internet can often lead to confusing and misleading results, especially if the food supplier doesn’t want its information to be found. For on-campus diners, the Sodexo website claims that 35 percent of its food is from New York and 57 percent is from fewer than 250 miles away. This is an uplifting fact, yet does not provide enough information to know whether the chicken you get is factory-farmed or free range, local or imported. Perhaps it is time that students start taking ownership and demand that Sodexo is more transparent about the sources of each food item. The more information available, the easier it is to align our dining choices with our moral ones.
I’m not suggesting that we know every little detail about every bite of food we swallow. Nevertheless, we live in a world where the simple decision of what to buy for dinner can have a huge impact on our health, environment, global economies and the lives of animals and farmers in every corner of the globe. Even just knowing where our food is produced would allow us to make smarter, hopefully more sustainable decisions. In turn, each of our informed decisions would lead us a small step towards living in the world we want.
Choosing to take ownership in what you eat will not create your ideal world overnight. However, if you want to be a better global citizen, it’s a pretty good place to start.