Eating in season is a way to practice sustainability that often gets ignored. When you can walk into the grocery store in Iowa and buy bananas 365 days a year, we forget that those bananas come from thousands of miles away and require land, water, and fuel to reach us.
If you want to live more eco-friendly way, a sustainable diet is a fantastic place to start. We all have to eat, every day, so it’s a place to have a big impact.
Here’s a sustainable eating strategy and a list of sustainable foods for you to start with.
Why Eating Sustainably is Better for the Planet
What we eat impacts more than just our own bodies. Farming and agriculture are two of the biggest reasons that humans today are no longer hunters and gatherers.
Large-scale agriculture has allowed people to settle in one spot, and it’s also helped shift us into an industrial world. It has meant that humans don’t have to spend all day simply trying to feed themselves, so we can do things like create businesses and art.
Unfortunately, there are some major downsides to how we currently farm. Across the world, humans are destroying forests to make space for cattle, as well as to grow crops to feed ourselves and livestock (like chickens, turkeys, and pigs). We are overfishing our oceans and killing off fish populations.
These things have huge impacts on our world. Deforestation means that we release more carbon into the air, heating up the planet. Clearing native plants and forests for food production is the greatest driver of wildlife loss. We destroy where animals live and that leads to the extinction of species.
When we eat more sustainably, we lessen the negative impacts of this system. We also create a demand for better systems. Food is just like money in today’s world- it’s a necessity that we can use to create change.
We all have to eat. But if more people opt for vegetables at the store, that tells companies to put more of their production efforts into growing vegetables instead of meat.
We can use our dollars and our dinner plates to create sustainable change. For example, here’s how you can host a Thanksgiving dinner on a budget while staying sustainable.
What Does It Mean to Eat Sustainably?
Eating more sustainably means eating in a way that reduces the harm our food system does to the planet.
And lucky for us, it’s very easy to east sustainably! Here are the highlights of how to eat a more eco-friendly diet.
Opt for vegetarian or vegan meals several times a week.
This is more sustainable than eating meat at every meal since meat takes a huge amount of energy, water, and land to produce. A single pound of beef takes, on average, 1,800 gallons of water to produce.
Shopping local (like buying from a farmer’s market)
This is a sustainable way to eat for two reasons. A banana grown in Colombia but eaten in England has to travel thousands of miles, meaning it needs to use lots of fossil fuels.
A chicken raised three miles down the road from you uses significantly less fossil fuels.
Also, food grown locally helps keep jobs and pollinators in your community! 90% of farms in the US gross less than $350,000 a year. After expenses, most farmers don’t make a lot of money. Buying local keeps your farmer in business and helps keep plants in your community for the pollinators.
How Sustainable Eating Saves You Money
Eating sustainably can also save you money. Sustainability has gotten a reputation as being more expensive than being unsustainable, but that’s rarely the case.
For example, if you want to grow some of your own food (probably the most sustainable approach to food!) you can save your plant seeds from season to season, and thus grow many fruits and vegetables from one original plant.
Even simply just eating in season will save you money. Foods that are out of season are more expensive to grow, ship, and sell.
Similarly, foods that are in season come in all at once. That means there’s an abundance and farmers and stores need to sell a lot of the same item at once. That usually means discounts!
Finally, you can eat more sustainably by eating the “ugly” foods. It’s funny to think about, but stores often only display the pretty foods; the apples that are perfectly shaped, the carrots that are the most orange.
The ugly food gets turned into other products (“ugly” apples get turned into applesauce, for example) or thrown out. Prevent food waste by buying the ugly foods.
Here’s a list of sustainable foods for every season!
List of Sustainable Foods
I’ve broken the list of sustainable foods into three different eco-friendly categories: water usage, grown in the US, and eating in season.
10 Foods That Use the Least Water
- Oat milk
- Sweet potatoes
- Peanuts
- Tomatoes
- Carrots
- Watermelon
- Turnips
- Onions
- Squash
- Eggplant
17 Foods Grown in North America
In the US, most produce comes from California, Iowa, Texas, and Indiana. So for this list of sustainable foods, I’m focusing on foods we grow in those states.
- Corn
- Rice
- Wheat
- Peanuts
- Oats
- Pecans
- Onions
- Potatoes
- Almonds
- Artichokes
- Clingstone Peaches
- Dried Plums
- Figs
- Olives
- Pomegranates
- Sweet Rice
- Walnuts
Eat in Season
Rather than list out foods for each season, just type your state and month into this website and you’ll find a list of sustainable foods to help you eat in season!
Join our newsletter for money and sustainability tips.
