It's too hard to eat sustainably

The need to give consumers more complete information

Most everyone loves chocolate-covered almonds. What’s not to love? An amazing combination of robust bitter-sweetness encasing a crunchy center. Plus, aren’t almonds good for you? Seems like the perfect snack. But for many reasons, they’re typically not.

Our knowledge of where our food (and water) comes from has mostly disappeared from common understanding. That’s a major problem, undoubtedly a unique consequence of the modern era. Most of us can’t answer the following questions about the food we are consuming in any given moment:

• What went into growing, harvesting, processing, and transporting that food?

• What were the true costs of that food? Both those included in the price – COGS and operational expenses – and those not included in the price – social and environmental knock-on effects related to community well-being, GHG emissions, ecosystem degradation, biodiversity loss, animal welfare, water usage, run-off pollution, and more.

• Who are the organizations responsible for creating and delivering that food to you? What are their incentives?

Making it easier for consumers to answer these questions is key to bringing about bottom-up change in our food system. Consumers want to do the right thing, but for many reasons, they almost always lack the information to make that right choice.

Important preface before going further: The unfortunate reality is the vast majority of people don’t have many (if any) choices on what food they can purchase due to affordability and accessibility. However, many of us with significant degrees of purchasing power do have a choice. This post is directed to the latter group. 

A problematic system

Back to chocolate almonds and a not-so-unlikely scenario that may have transpired for you without your awareness: You’re at the grocery store and you buy a pack of chocolate almonds from a consumer-packaged goods (CPG) company. That CPG company sourced a portion its almonds from the thousands of acres it owns in the Central Valley of California – or potentially from the hundreds of thousands of acres that owned by a mixture of pension funds, investment banks, and insurers. Importantly, these landholders have extensive rights to the water below the soil. In order to grow the almonds, a crop that naturally requires large volumes of water year-round, the companies construct deep wells and over-irrigate the land. This drains the dwindling aquifer and depletes potable water for the surrounding community’s residents, a particularly troubling dynamic in a state that has experienced its driest decades in 1,200 years. Once the water starts running out, the landowners dig deeper wells to access more water, which results in higher toxicity leaching in the groundwater. In 2022, almost 1,500 domestic wells in California went dry, and almost a million Californians had no safe drinking water in their homes. This forces community members to suffer and possibly relocate. And the cycle continues.

That’s just the almond part of the equation. The cocoa sourced by the same CPG company is grown in West Africa, where it has become an underpriced commodity. Plus, the perilous harvesting of it was completed by underage child laborers (I recommend watching the recent John Oliver segment for a high-level overview on our chocolate supply chain).

This reality goes beyond chocolate and almonds. It’s the avocado we import that are controlled by cartels in Michoacán, Mexico, the bacon on our plate from highly pollutive pig farms in North Carolina, the peanut butter jar that has palm oil likely sourced from deforested swaths of Indonesia, the steaks that originates from inhumane concentrated-animal feeding operations (CAFOs), the salmon riddled with sea lice, waste, and antibiotics from net-pen fish farms in Chile, and much more.

Does this narrative apply to all of these foods in all geographies? Definitely not. There are layers and layers of nuance across each ingredient, and I’m not suggesting we stop eating all these foods in totality. 

In fact, for every major narrative around devastation, there are also cases of sustainability and net-positive chain reactions. For example, buying artisanal single-origin, bean to bar chocolate from tropical forests that support smallholder farmers and their families can provide substantial economic and conservation impact. And according to the Almond Board of California, over 90% of almond farms are family farms (many run by third- and fourth-generation farmers who live on the land), and nearly 70% of California almond farms are 100 acres or less. These folks are likely not drilling 1,000 ft deep wells, and are instead focused on sharply decreasing water usage and integrating whole-orchard recycling.

But ultimately, in our food system designed for mass production at X margin, these foods are commonly plagued with unsustainable tendencies. Therefore, developing a baseline understanding of food sustainability is important. Sadly, that’s easier said than done.

Hypocrisy

You’re likely thinking, “oh shut up! Get off your pedestal, man! I know you still eat chocolate almonds and plenty of other foods that have negative sustainability impacts.” And yes, you’re somewhat right :). 

I definitely still enjoy eating the occasional bag of peanut M&M’s at the movies and a burger from In-N-Out. But the frequency by which I make those purchases has dropped dramatically, particularly as I’ve had the opportunity to learn more about our food system through my job. I always come back to the point that incremental change bears impact. Opting for the more sustainable choice 80%, 50%, even 10% of the time makes a difference. 

Asymmetric information

The frustrating part is many of us often try making the more sustainable food purchasing decision every time! It’s just truly so hard to know which choice to make.

Hey, wild-caught salmon is better to buy than farm-raised, right?

Well, what about all the plastic pollution and issues of bycatch and ecosystem loss that come with industrial fishing?

Okay so I should buy farm-raised?

Have you seen the awful conditions of salmon in those big net-pen farms?

But it’s from Norway!! That seems good, right?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no!

Got it. But I should definitely buy fish that’s always fresh and never frozen. That seems like a no-brainer.

Actually no, that’s a misnomer. Freezing fish immediately - and keeping it frozen - locks in its peak freshness. It’s fairly easy for un-frozen fish to sit out for too long and get kind of nasty. Of course, sometimes frozen fish become unfrozen and then frozen again, so that one’s pretty much a toss-up.

Jeez! So what should I buy? I really want to make this new recipe I found, and the doctor told me to eat more omega-3’s from salmon!

Depending on the species, wild-caught from smaller fisheries in Alaska is your best bet. The fish stocks are healthy there, practices are relatively more sustainable, and you’re supporting important jobs in the seafood industry. Farm-raised can be great too. Your best options are to go with local US-based fisheries. There are land based systems in the US called RAS, which are mostly immune from issues like microplastics and disease. Otherwise, look for salmon from New Zealand or Eastern Canada.

What is RAS? How do you know all this??

The food supply chain is littered with nuances, and it’s too time intensive to actively research each ingredient, in every food, at every purchase point.

Corporations bear the full responsibility of the supply chain decisions they make, which trickle down to the range of purchasing decisions most consumers have available. The issue lies with asymmetric information. Consumers don’t know what they don’t know, and if they had the full picture (along with purchasing power) they would be able to drive demand toward more sustainable decisions. Instead, corporations have the advantage of complete information, and they hold onto it in order to more successfully sell their products to a less-informed public. 

Addressing this information gap is critical, and we must find ways to empower the consumer. However, to say consumers hold no leverage in the equation also seems incomplete.

Role of consumers

It’s important for us to acknowledge the role we are actively playing in the food system. The reality is we, the end consumers, are continuously paying the upstream producers (mostly big CPG conglomerates) for their services. The dollars and cents we give to a company to produce that food, at a certain price and margin, drives further incentive for that company to keep extracting from the land and sea via the status quo.

Undoubtedly, the broader system needs to change for large-scale impact to happen. The costs of more sustainable options are very often outside the reach of consumers’ very rational price sensitivity. But incremental changes and purchases still hold significance. That significance can add up and be the difference between another 10,000 acres being clear cut for palm oil in Indonesia, or another 200 families not needing to relocate from the Central Valley because all the water has been sapped away. 

Changing purchasing patterns does incentivize companies to shift their product lines – and the practices to create those product lines – to earn our money. Examples of this are clear with the likes of Vital Farms, Applegate, and EPIC Provisions releasing new product lines on “regenerative” acres. Might there be elements of greenwashing from the big brands with big regen ag commitments? Sure. But selecting a food in the store backed by a regen ag claim is likely better than the alternative from another large CPG company.

What to do about it

So, as a consumer, what is there to do in this dilemma of asymmetric information, hidden consequences, and limited agency? Just try your best. 

When shopping, look out for brands that are part of the Regenerative Organic Alliance or the Savory Institute’s Land to Market initiative. For other products, try to parse out any claims of sustainability or regenerative practices on product packaging.

Read up where you can to gain an understanding of where our food comes from, ask questions (though don’t get all Portlandia about it), and try to make the better choice more often when presented with one. Some good places to start are readings from Civil Eats, Ambrook, Bloomberg Green, and films like Patagonia’s Stories series. There are always two sides to every situation, but gaining the baseline knowledge is helpful to then dive into the nuance and ultimately make the more sustainable decisions.

In light of limited individual agency, macro-level changes are needed to help make this awareness more commonplace for consumers. This predominantly comes down to changes in policy. It would be a gamechanger if nutrition labels and packaging were required to show the true social, economic, and environmental costs that went into that food.

Source: Food+Tech Connect

Additionally, there many startups and corporations like IBM and Walmart working to bring traceability from farm to fork / dock to dish. It will be great if/when these become regular solutions, but we’re not there yet in terms of market demand and regulatory requirements.

This is also where nutrient density can make a significant impact for consumers: higher nutrient density is scientifically correlated with more sustainable agricultural practices, in addition to all the known health benefits. Bringing nutrient density to product packaging and labels would be transformational in terms of consumer knowledge (shout out to Edacious for working to make this a reality).

Concluding thoughts

We all involuntarily play a role in perpetuating the status quo of our food system, and are largely handcuffed into doing so because of incomplete information. While we wait for policy to change and/or corporations to transition to better practices out of the goodness of their heart, we must find ways to empower consumers with a more complete set of information to drive change with our dollars, and ultimately reconnect with where our food is coming from.

Anyways, I’ll get off my soapbox now :).