Sustainable Eating & Nutrition

If you live somewhere like Alaska eating fresh vegetables from local sources will be difficult during the long winter. Put up food if you can, and don’t overlook frozen vegetables when they are out of season. If you supplement your diet with non-local fruits and vegetables try to pay attention to the number of miles your food traveled to get from the farm to your pantry. That goes for people outside Alaska too. Pay attention to what is in season in your region. For a list of what is in season each month in your state, go to the Sustainable Table website, which is run by the GRACE Communications Foundation.

If you have the space, consider buying a freezer. A freezer will encourage you to put up food from the farmers’ market, allowing you to buy produce in bulk when it is at the height of its season, which is when it will be the most abundant and therefore cheapest. And freezing (unlike canning) does not significantly diminish the nutritional value of produce. That said, canning can be another way to preserve vegetables and fruits beyond the summer months.

Americans are eating more soy products than ever before, thanks largely to the ingenuity of an industry eager to process and sell the vast amounts of subsidized soy coming off American and South American farms. But today we’re eating soy in ways Asian cultures with a much longer experience of the plant would not recognize: “Soy protein isolate,” “soy isoflavones,” “textured vegetable protein” from soy and soy oils (which now account for a fifth of the calories in the American diet) are finding their way into thousands of processed foods, with the result that Americans now eat more soy than the Japanese or the Chinese do.

Yet there are questions about the implications of these novel food products for our health. Soy isoflavones, found in most soy products, are compounds that resemble estrogen, and in fact bind to human estrogen receptors. But it is unclear whether these so-called phytoestrogens actually behave like estrogen in the body or only fool it into thinking they’re estrogen. Either way the phytoestrogens might have an effect (good or bad) on the growth of certain cancers, the symptoms of menopause and the functions of the endocrine system. Because of these uncertainties, the FDA has declined to grant GRAS (‘generally regarded as safe’) status to soy isoflavones used as a food additive. As a senior scientist at the FDA’s National Center for Toxicological Research wrote, “Confidence that soy products are safe is clearly based more on belief than hard data.” Until those data come in, I feel more comfortable eating soy prepared in the traditional Asian style than according to novel recipes developed by processors like Archer Daniels Midland. For more on soy see In Defense of Food, section III.

Recently a handful of well-controlled comparisons of crops grown organically and conventionally have found appreciably higher levels of anti-oxidants, flavonoids, vitamins, minerals and other nutrients in several of the organic crops. Of course after a few days riding cross-country in a truck, the nutritional quality of any kind of produce will deteriorate, so ideally you want to look for food that is both organic and local.

But I think eating vegetables and fruit is so important that I buy them even when they’re not organic –and even when they’re not fresh. There’s nothing wrong with frozen vegetables, and they’re usually a bargain. Some canned vegetables are a great deal, too, though they often have too much salt. The key thing? Eat plants (including whole grains), animals, and fungi as lightly processed as you can find them at the prices you can afford.

Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the training to prescribe diets or offer specific nutritional advice. If you have not done so already, pick up a copy of my new book Food Rules, which lays out some basic concepts for eating well. I highly recommend Marion Nestle’s book What to Eat. You might also take a look at Gary Taubes’ book Good Calories, Bad Calories.

Today in America there is soaring demand for local and regional food; farmers’ markets, of which the U.S.D.A. estimates there are now 4,700, have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the food market. Community-supported agriculture is booming as well: there are now nearly 1,500 community-supported farms, to which consumers pay an annual fee in exchange for a weekly box of produce through the season. For a list of farmers’ markets across the U.S. go to USDA Agricultural Marketing Service or put your zip code into the map tool on the Local Harvest website, which will also turn up CSAs.