During spring, one of the best things to do is to go for a stroll through green pastures and flowering landscapes. When these beautiful flowers blossom, it is just a matter of time until fruits like apples, cherries or pears, or berries from bushes grow, ready to be eaten. The same is true for vegetables and other certain foods – yellow blossoms will lead to tomatoes, white blossoms to peppers, or maybe also to beans or potatoes. From blossoms, most of the foods we eat emerge. One must add, though, that these only count for healthy diets, not diets mostly consisting of pre-cooked fast foods.
And this brings us to a very important point: A certain type of diet is better for our health, and not just ours, but also for planetary health, and for all the species we co-exist with on Earth. It may surprise some of you reading, but our diet has a huge impact on the environment, while at the same time, it is one of the aspects that most define our daily life.
Three times a day all of us make a choice: we decide what to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and maybe we also have an occasional snack or tea time with some pastries. For the sake of ease of the following little mind experiment, let us keep the number of three meals a day in mind. Three times a day, that makes 21 choices per week, 84 per month, and a whopping 4,368 choices every year.
So, if the average person lives to the age of 75, and we disregard about 15 years of that (while we are a toddler or during the last years of our life, we hardly take the decision of what to eat ourselves), we still have 60 years of conscious decision-making regarding our diet. Considering the numbers we have established just a few sentences earlier, how many choices does this leave us? Exactly, 26,208 decisions throughout our whole life. Absolutely fascinating.
But what is the purpose of going through all these numbers? One of the biggest issues in our current society, a society that has been and will be facing many challenges over the last few years and next decades, is that people usually think that they don’t have much power in this world.
However, when we understand that in a capitalistic world ‘offer’ is always driven by demand and that people are those who decide what is demanded, we understand that we do have power – the power to make a change. And the numbers from the previous paragraph should have clarified that our diet is one of the most powerful tools we have. 26,208 opportunities to make a difference. To better our impact on the world.
It also should show us that, even if we’re not perfect, even if we don’t make the best choices from an environmental perspective in every meal, even if we just give 50%, 13,104 good choices is still an incredible number, still a compelling way of contributing a pragmatic change for the coming generations to thrive and lead a sound life.
You see, you have been given a powerful tool now – your diet. And you understand why it is so mighty – because it is one of the biggest parts of your life. But that’s not all. There’s more to it – you still need to understand why our diet impacts our Earth’s environment and climate.
And this is where Blossoms of Modernism comes in. Following Blossoms of Modernism will lead you to your most environmental-friendly diet. So stay tuned for more articles to come!
