Amid conflicting arguments, agendas, and information, an experienced food writer shares how she navigates her own choices.
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In the 2019 season of The Good Place, the TV show that humorously explored moral philosophy, the main characters find out that very few souls have been let into the Good Place for several hundred years. Ted Danson’s Michael explains to Maya Rudolf’s Judge: “Life now is so complicated, it’s impossible for anyone to be good enough for the Good Place … these days just buying a tomato at a grocery store means that you are unwittingly supporting toxic pesticides, exploiting labor, contributing to global warming. Humans think that they’re making one choice, but they’re actually making dozens of choices they don’t even know they’re making.”

The Judge replies: “Your big revelation is life is complicated? That’s not a revelation. That’s a divorced woman’s throw pillow.”

It made an impression on me at the time to hear food ethics discussed on a network TV show, and it’s lingered in my mind ever since. These are issues that have occupied me for some time: Who has been exploited so I can eat what I eat? What damages has the environment absorbed to bring me dinner?

It puts all of us into a difficult ethical dilemma. But I don’t feel right about the way it was presented in the context of the TV show. Making the right food choices, conscious or unconscious, shouldn’t be about how good a person you are. I am not so interested in the consequences of tomato-related purchases on my afterlife. But I am interested in how our choices can help bring about effective changes in the systems that brought us that fraught tomato. I want better tomatoes for everyone!

The ideas of personal purity and rectitude can make environmentalists and food activists seem smug and elitist, like modern-day Puritans. If we make these choices into sins, one slip-up is a permanent black mark. For me, it feels better to have a personal ideal of what the ethical choices are, and make them the best I can. Which is imperfectly.

Because there’s one thing Michael got right: It’s complicated.

Even before we consider ethical questions, we all have other food-shopping agendas: what tastes good, how much money to spend, what we consider healthy, what our kids will eat, how much time we have to cook, how easy it is to get to a food store in the first place. I’ll go to farmers’ markets, several grocery stores, ethnic stores, and mail-order websites to get the right food—until I feel I could list my occupation as hunter-gatherer.

Then we need to recognize that most modern agriculture is simply not sustainable. To acknowledge that we can afford a burger because a worker in a meatpacking plant received little pay for dangerous work, that the farmer who grew our processed food got only 14.5 cents of each dollar we pay, that the yellowtail/Hamachi we love as sushi is on the brink of disappearing.

So we’d like to avoid being part of the problem. We try to work those considerations into our shopping decisions—meanwhile, the agendas multiply and contradict each other. And while our personal agendas have immediate results in our own lives, the ethical ones are more abstract and involve people we don’t even know, and are therefore harder to take into account.

If we care about all this, how the Other Place are we supposed to shop?

Building a Case for Better Food

I’ve had to work my way through a lot of arguments to get to a personal food ethic, translated into menus and shopping lists, that makes sense to me. I’m still working on following it consistently.

The first argument you have to win—the biggest one—is whether it’s even reasonable to think that one person can make a difference. Why is it my problem to solve?

There’s a school of thought that all food and environmental problems should be dragged to the feet of the corporations and governmental entities that brought them about and dropped them, while we stare up at them and see what they’re going to do. It shouldn’t be about shoveling the guilt and responsibility onto individuals. It’s true: A few regulatory changes made in federal farm policy, for instance, could do more than hordes of people like you and I could do in a lifetime. Thinking this way could relieve us of responsibility—let us say “screw it!” and dine like a Roman emperor on feedlot beef and orange roughy and flamingo tongues if we want.

I see the argument—and I totally agree that we should switch the language and location of blame—but I’m not going to eat flamingo tongues. Or Sugar Pops.

But change comes from the bottom as well as the top. If we want agriculture that doesn’t make climate change worse, we need to support the small-scale, conscientious farmers who know how to grow food while putting carbon back into the soil. If we deplore ultraprocessed food, we should show there’s a market for better choices.

Also, this is a collective movement. You are not really just one person. Even things that seem niche and impractical have to exist in the world before they can be taken up by the systems that will really make a difference. If people hadn’t bought those funny-looking original Honda Insight hybrids, would we now be seeing a government push to subsidize electric cars? We have to support the alternatives, so we can prove innovative concepts and show that a better way is possible.

Even if we agree that individual choices can matter, we’re still faced with a world of confusion, counterarguments, unintended consequences, and whataboutisms.

Organic farming can’t feed the world, we’re told, because it takes too much land. Meatless Impossible Burgers may replace meat, but are overly processed and unhealthy. It turns out that it takes 25,000 plastic grocery bags to match the environmental effects of producing one canvas bag, according to a Danish study. Almond milk contributes less to climate change than dairy milk—but wait: Don’t almond trees use an awful lot of water? Or my favorite: Until we overthrow capitalism, none of this matters.

I say, “Get thee behind me, Satan.” There are points to be considered, but they don’t automatically win the argument. Organic takes room, but so do crops that are supported by federal subsidies and turned into non-nutritive sodas and processed food. And we would use land more efficiently if we didn’t eat so much meat and didn’t waste 40% of the food we raise. Meat substitutes may be viable options for people who are taking the most substantial food-related environmental step a person can, by giving up meat. The article about the plastic bags just made me want to double down on always using one of the 58 canvas bags that have drifted their way into my house. Almond milk requires water, but less than cow’s milk.

Building a Sustainable Food Agenda

Amid a swirl of conflicting information and opinion, it’s beneficial to educate yourself, and it’s also okay to come down on the side of a contradiction that you most care about. Do the best you can, and don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The key is to make some big changes that automate your choices, rather than having to agonize over every single thing you buy.

Here are some steps that I’ve been taking, and I invite you to consider them from the perspective of your own circumstances.

Buy local when you can. If there’s one thing that I feel sure about, it’s that everyone should participate in the beautiful, life-affirming, inspiring world of local food. The early selling point of local food was that your food didn’t travel as far, saving energy in transportation. That does not turn out to be the main benefit. For me, it’s about supporting a local economy, but mostly it’s about enabling the kind of farms that generally sell their produce locally: small, individually tended, regenerative, and organic or close to it. These are farmers who know how to keep carbon in the soil. That’s what agriculture needs to do to solve climate change.

So make the farmers’ market a destination that you want to go to. I get a huge lift out of buying greens and winter carrots, which are the best carrots I’ve ever had, at the winter farmers’ market. I love the bounty and beauty of heirloom tomatoes and green beans in the summer. I have learned to love every kind of green and turnip. And giving myself permission to buy locally made apricot croissants and an iced latte incentivizes the deal. Going with a friend could also get you there regularly. Or how about getting a beer at the Sunday morning Hyde Park winter farmers’ market at MadTree Brewing?

Re-evaluate your grocery budget. I have noticed that people hang on to their ideas of how much food should cost well beyond current reality. I never take a “that’s outrageous” attitude toward, say, an $8 pint of fresh local raspberries; I buy them if I want them and I have the money, and I don’t have qualms about spending money at a farmers’ market. Maybe you actually can afford to buy organic and local. Think about it. If you can’t, you can’t, and you shouldn’t, obviously, apologize for it. If you don’t have time, you don’t have time. (Perhaps consider a delivered CSA box?)

Mind the waste. Anyone of any income can resolve to waste less food. If there’s anything in this discussion I consider sinful, that’s it. Don’t over-buy. Freeze extras, eat leftovers, make soup. Compost the scraps.

Find where your agendas converge. Health and ethics definitely run on the same path. There is a rough but real correlation between eating well for your body (say, the Mediterranean diet) and eating well for the planet: low on meat, low on processed foods, high on produce. Eating minimal carbs and upping fiber to keep my incipient diabetes at bay helps me make good choices. It eliminates a lot of processed things, like sweetened yogurt, packaged cookies, instant dinners, breakfast cereal. Except for a few weeks around the end of the year, I try to save my carbs for fruit and whole grains.

Become a vegetarian or vegan. Meat takes more land, more water, more pesticide-grown grain, creates more waste, is in general so much less efficient than other forms of protein. We can’t keep it up if we’re going to keep feeding the world. Period.

I’m not there yet. And it’s a major lifestyle change. So, at least, eat less meat—and if you do buy meat, make it high-quality, by which I mean grass-fed, pastured, and locally raised. The one situation when meat can be seen as virtuous, environmentally speaking, is when it comes from a regenerative farm, one that integrates livestock into its overall soil fertility program.

Buy fair-trade or direct-trade coffee and chocolate. Find some way not to run out of it, so you don’t have to resort to the cheap stuff. Vet the coffee shop or roaster you buy from and confirm that anything you buy there meets your criteria.

Know your labels. If you want organic because you can’t stand thinking about the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, or the algae blooms in Lake Erie, or birds and insects killed by artificial pesticides and herbicides, USDA Organic is one of the most reliable labels. The Marine Stewardship Council is a good sustainable seafood certification. I won’t guide you through all the different ways products can be labeled, or all the certifications, or all the claims brands can make—it’s too much to cover here. Educate yourself, be skeptical, make decisions about the labels and certification logos you’ll always look for, and stay committed to those choices.

Understand sustainable seafood. If you look at the standard guide, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, you will reel from all the choices, because how and where a particular seafood is fished makes a difference. I stick to a few domestically caught or raised species that I know are almost always sustainable: Alaskan fish, trout, char, black cod, farmed scallops, and oysters. I don’t order seafood at restaurants and I don’t eat sushi much anymore.

So that’s my ethical food agenda. I still have plenty of room for improvement. Because no matter what, other agendas take precedence from time to time. My 95-year-old mother loves sushi, so I’ll get it for her. Meijer had 10-pound pork butts for 99 cents a pound recently, and my inner thrifty housewife and I lugged home one the size of a bowling ball. When I got an emotional gut-punch that created a dent exactly the shape and size of a McDonald’s hot fudge sundae, that’s what I got, and I felt better.

I may be a secular sinner, but I don’t believe in repenting, only in trying harder.