The sustainable lifestyle picker
This interview with Taras Grescoe about his book Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood got me thinking. In the interview, Grescoe gets into some detail about which fishes you should avoid and which you should seek if you want to support sustainable fishing practices. This information isn’t entirely new to me, as I’ve spent some time browsing the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch website in the past, but I admit that I rarely keep these considerations in mind when I’m at the seafood counter or at a restaurant. (I’ve been pretty good in avoiding swordfish and Chilean sea bass, but salmon and shrimp are hard to resist.)
I’m also in the midst of reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, so recently I’ve been overwhelmed with information about sustainable and ethical living. It seems to me that there’s no way even an informed and conscious eater could manage to weigh and measure all the various consequences of their daily routines without resorting to a life of ascetism or obsession, and even then the inevitable unpredictability of this complex world is likely to lead you to misinformed behavior.
So what kinds of decisions should a concerned individual make to best support sustainable living? Is it more important to eat locally, eat the right seafood, cut down beef consumption, or something else? The answer of course depends on what issues are subjectively more important to you.
Ideally, I’d have access to a reliable tool where I could go and add moral weights to a slate of issues: energy independence, pollution, biodiversity, animal cruelty, human rights, etc. The tool would then display a ranked list of lifestyle changes that would best further your moral goals, so that you could, e.g., choose to focus more of your efforts on cutting your beef consumption than avoiding farmed shrimp. Such a tool would be even more useful if it could also be relevant for the average suburban American – e.g., what are the best fast food restaurants to patronize, or the best dishes at Applebee’s?
This tool certainly would have to be built upon expert opinion to determine how the weighted issues relate to each lifestyle change, and even then there’s still no way to avoid some level of arbitrariness and uncertainty. But, if possible, it would be good to have some knowledgeable filter on ethical living that doesn’t solely rely on television newsmagazines, government regulation, or market forces.
In truth, I wouldn’t expect that such a tool would be accurate and effective in practice due to the sheer complexity of the world, but I’d like to try one anyway out of curiosity. It’d be like one of those candidate picker websites. Anyone have a link?
Comments (15)
This is actually an interesting idea. While I probably wouldn't use this particular tool, I can envision a lot (and I mean a LOT) of people who would. If you can put together something reasonably easy to use and fairly supportable by both facts and people's perception of the facts this could be very popular (and profitable, let's start advertising co-ops!).
Watch out, though, the ethical types love to poke holes in this sort of thing. You have to be very precise and provide data to back up everything you assert.
Build it.
You really think a lot of people would be interested? I know "green" is super-trendy right now, but I have to think that Joe and Jane Q. Public are going to go back to throwing fast food wrappers out of car windows in a couple of years.
That said, the large-in-LA food hippie community would probably like it a whole lot.
It wouldn't be hard to build technology-wise, but reputable expert opinion would be necessary. (I don't think machine learning would help here unless you data originated from a knowledgeable pool of people.)
It's an interesting idea, but I think that the mind-blowing detail would be impossible to achieve given how quickly things change, and the unreliability of food sources. Perhaps for one city it would work, if there was enough of a network of experts-- although as a conservation professional, I'm extremely weary of everything labeled as environmentally friendly or organic because of the pervasiveness of greenwashing-- and, in fact, sometimes the best conservation/sustainable living solutions are not humanly ethical. A middle ground approach should exist to support economic development where appropriate.
"I'm also in the midst of reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, so recently I've been overwhelmed with information about sustainable and ethical living. It seems to me that there's no way even an informed and conscious eater could manage to weigh and measure all the various consequences of their daily routines without resorting to a life of ascetism or obsession, and even then the inevitable unpredictability of this complex world is likely to lead you to misinformed behavior."
Just wanted to follow up and agree with what you said here.
I'm sure you agree with the following comment I am going to make as well, which is that it is better to ask questions and do our best when we can-- all while not driving ourselves crazy to be perfect world citizens. When in fact, there might not be such a thing.
I agree with Slater. If all the people who ate McDonalds every day simply cut it down to once a week ... and those who ate it once a week cut it down to once a month.... well you see where i'm going. The best part of Omnivore's Dilemma is actually the beginning when he mocks American culture for all it's extremes around eating and food.
It's ghastly to imagine that *anybody* eats McDonalds every day, but I bet there are far more that do than I'm comfortable with.
I think the number is 1 in 4 people eat fast food every day. Although if you ate a veggie sub at Subway every day, that would count. (I imagine it's mostly hamburgers, tacos, and fried chicken.)
any fast food or just big brand fast food? Would a small nyc deli count? what about a local counter burger store? Or a small chain? If that all counts I'm surprised it's not higher; where else do people go for lunch when they don't bring it?
Here's the study: http://www.jacn.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/2/163
Hmm, I found the CSFII survey data from 1994, and it seems like all they asked is something like: "How many times a week do you eat fast food?" I imagine the average person would interpret this as your usual fast food chains, but maybe they had a clarifying statement on the survey.
If I saw that on the survey, I wouldn't count the deli I visit several times each weekday, nor the taco counter place I occasionally go to. But I would count my visits to In n' Out Burger, Subway, and the generic chicken-in-sugar-sauce places you see in the mall food court.
I wouldn't have counted Subway.
She wrote to the current Sec. of Treasury about it -- I think she wanted it to be an immediate step:
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN0342861320071203
Did that study seem poorly written to you?
i think you want another thread, RD.