The food sitting in tins, bottles, cardboard boxes and plastic bags in your cupboards and fridges can have a huge impact on your family’s carbon emissions. Processed convenience food, is the answer for many people who need to get around the problem of a hectic lifestyle, but it has a huge disadvantage; the amount of energy required to produce it. In addition, the amount of additives, preservatives and artificial colours and flavourings contained in a lot of processed food, although being reduced by some manufacturers, is still a consideration when choosing what to buy.
Fruit and vegetables are an important part of most people’s diets, and although we all strive to hit our 5 a day quota, cooking from scratch is not possible for everybody. The fresh fruit and vegetables we buy also have important considerations however, in terms of their production and origins. Cheaply produced fruit and vegetables are usually grown intensively on a large scale, therefore likely using harmful pesticides and fertilisers to make up for the goodness lost from the soil through the intensive processes being used to grow it. In addition, the food miles our veg has travelled is an issue that can’t be ignored. Often supermarkets carry apples shipped in from New Zealand even when there are British apples on the trees in UK orchards. Where goods only grow abroad, such as bananas, pineapples and coconuts, this is obviously unavoidable unless people choose to stop eating these fruits, which will never be a practical solution to the problem. However there are still steps we can tale to reduce the carbon emissions of these items, as well as a large number of other items on the weekly shopping list.
Free range is on the up, with popularity growing for both meat and egg production across the UK. Even the country’s supermarkets and businesses are getting in on the act, and about time too. But there is a concern that free range might not be all it’s cracked up to be, at least not in the long term if some revisions to current standards are rolled out across Britain’s poultry farms.