How to eat ethically

Choose well: Angela Crocombe wants us to think about what we eat. Picture: Aaron Pocock

When did food become so scary? Fruit and vegetables coated with pesticides. Dairy laden with colours and flavours. Fish riddled with mercury. Canola courtesy of genetically modified crops. It seems every day we read another reason not to eat something previously regarded as safe or healthy.

Throw in questions about the ethics of eating and suddenly heading to the shops takes on the appearance of a minefield. How has the cow that delivered your steak been treated; were those eggs from chickens caged one on top of the other; how many carbon emissions did those tomatoes emit on the way to your salad; is that fillet of fish from a sustainable source; were the coffee beans in your latte produced with exploited labour?

No wonder many of us just simply throw our hands up in the air and keep buying as before. But, argues ethical eating advocate Angela Crocombe, it is not that hard to do the right thing. She has been practising what she preaches for years.

“It does take a bit more effort in the beginning,” she acknowledges. “But once you find the brands and you’ve checked the labels and you know that this product is sustainably fished or doesn’t have any additives, or hasn’t come from too far away… it becomes second nature.”

The author, whose previous book A Lighter Footprint showed us ways to reduce our carbon footprint, spent months researching the topic for her latest release. Ethical Eating: How to Make Food Choices That Won’t Cost The Earth covers topics such as climate change, animal welfare, chemicals, packaging and organic farming, with easy-to-read chapters on different foods (meat, dairy, seafood, drinks etc). Angela hopes the book will give readers a greater appreciation for food and influence our shopping choices. As she writes in the introduction, “What we choose to eat is one of the most important decisions we make on a daily basis.”

She believes more people are thinking about the impact of their choices.  “Climate change is bringing a lot of these issues to the fore,” she says. “We have to make that information available to people there and make it easier for people to make environmentally sound choices.”

But hasn’t the global financial crisis put these concerns on the back foot? “I think with this whole financial crisis has been building up for years. It’s reaching some kind of nexus where people will wake up and start making major changes,” she argues. “(The financial meltdown) may well put the environment on the backfoot for a little while but this (environmental) crisis is far, far bigger and it encompasses everything about our society.”

Angela has long been concerned about what she puts in her mouth, turning her back on red meat from an early age despite her father’s insistence that her mother not cater for “the phase”. A vegequarian (someone who doesn’t eat meat, but eats seafood, dairy and eggs), the issue of eating ethically has come into even sharper focus now she is pregnant with her first child.

“Certainly what goes into my mouth and the baby’s, particularly for those first few years, is really, really important to me.” she says emphatically. “There are so many toxins that you can’t control so it’s imperative to control or minimise the ones I can.”

Health comes first

Angela believes it is important for mothers to take the lead in the ethical eating stakes. “Women are still the main food purchasers and preparers in the house so they are really important in terms of changing the perception of food for the whole family,” she says.

But who has time to read the labels in supermarkets and check for additives, country of origin, sustainable fishing logos and the like when they’re battling fractious children? “In your average supermarket now there are a lot more ethical options available to us… It is possible and very doable to do the right thing,” Angela says. “And to me you can give your child all the material objects in the world, but what really matters is that they have love and that they have good food going into their bodies to give them the best health.”

She thinks many people have their priorities all wrong. “A girlfriend of mine in the States, they’ve got three kids and they’ve got this enormous house and every object  a child could ever want,” she says.  “I went to the supermarket and was trying to encourage her and say, ‘here’s these organic bananas and they’re a really good price’. She was, “oh, no that doesn’t interest me, that doesn’t concern me’. And I think, ‘you’re so concerned about your children and giving them the right start, how can you not be concerned about what they put in their bodies?’.”

Many shoppers, though, would be put off by the added cost of ethical food choices?  “Eating a healthy diet is actually quite cheap.” argues Angela. “Lentils are cheap, fruit and vegies are much cheaper than anything that’s been processed and put in a jar. And even if you can’t buy all-organic by cutting down on or cutting meat out of your diet you can save LOTS of money. My thing is eat less meat, spend that bit that you’re going to save buying organic fruit and veg if you can, especially the ones that retain more toxins, such as apples and grapes… and really it shouldn’t cost any more than it was costing before.”

The power of choice

She acknowledges, though, that depending on where you live it’s not always easy to make the right choice. It’s all very well to buy organic or locally at farmers markets if you live near good suppliers, but if home is a remote town where everything is brought in by road or air, for example, it’s not so simple.

“It’s good to have general principles but not to beat yourself up about it because you’re going to feel guilty and then you’re probably going to give up and it’s going to become a negative thing rather than a positive thing that you feel good about doing,” she says.

“It is very difficult to be 100 percent ethical 100 percent of the time, but it is about awareness. And the more you can think about where something has come from and the implications of that the better off we all are… I think all of us need to be reminded that we do in fact hold a lot of power in our hands and do have the power to make a difference.”