Dr. Richard Oppenlander - Food Choice and Sustainability: Why Buying Local, Eating Less Meat, and Taking Baby Steps Wont Work

Food Choice and Sustainability is not a typical nonfiction book, and its not about what to eat. It is about accurately defining sustainability as it relates to food choices and making a fundamental change in our lives to better achieve it. It provides both hard facts and unique insights as to why this change is necessary and then sets forth a clear path to follow. Food Choice and Sustainability builds on my first book, Comfortably Unaware filling in blanks, connecting dots, and most important, providing a prescription of food choice sustainability for individuals, academic institutions, NGOs, and other organizations, business leaders, communities, developing nations, all other countries, and policymakers. It may appear that this book was written for two distinctly different audiences: those wanting to become more aware and those who want to effect positive change who may need more detailed information and scripting on how to do so. It was, indeed, written for both.

Food Choice and Sustainability is a book about sustainability of our planet, our resources, and ourselves. For most people, the word sustainable means lasting a while or enduring and unfortunately its usually customized or molded to fit a momentary need or wantall fairly subjective. For me, sustainability must account for the realities of time, space, relativity, and optimization. The concept of being sustainable must project beyond self to include society and future societies, human and non-human lifeboth domesticated and wild life. The thought of achieving sustainability must extend through many layerseconomic, social, ethicalnot just ecologicaland ultimately be carried by our choice of foods.

While Food Choice and Sustainability is indeed a book about sustainability, at the same time, it is a book about food choice and responsibility, which are intertwined inextricably with the concept of achieving sustainability.

Global depletion is a term I have used over the years to describe the loss of our primary resources on earth, as well as the loss of our own health due to our choice of a certain type of food. Therefore, global depletion essentially is about sustainability, but we need to hear it from a different direction and with a more accurate view, through an unfiltered lens. Most of us have heard about the atrocities of factory farms, the issues with high-fructose corn syrup, and the industrialization or processing of foods and their contribution to obesityall important topics. But these simply are small fragments of the picture.

The largest contributing factor to all areas of global depletion is the raising and eating of more than 70 billion animals each year and the extracting of 12 trillion fish from our oceans annually. Its simply not sustainable whether factory farms are in the equation or not. Because the word sustainable is often misused, I advocate the term relative or optimal sustainability.

Even as we deplete our natural resources, we add 230,000 new human mouths to feed each day. Its predicted that in just eighteen years, there will be a 40 percent global water shortage (over 1 billion people already are without adequate drinking water; 2 billion are without running water for cleaning and hygiene). Nearly 1 billion people are affected by hunger; 6 million children will starve to death in 2013.