GET FOSSIL FUELS OUT OF YOUR FOOD

EPISODE SUMMARY

What is at stake with our inaction to stop the causes of climate change? Today the answer comes in the harrowing images from Maui in real-time. What does tomorrow bring? We can change what is happening today with our next food shopping trip.

In this episode, I connect the dots between extreme weather events caused by climate change, the burning of fossil fuels, and our food.   

I offer simple action steps you can take today to align yourself with the solution.

There is power in the collective,
Florencia

LINKS AND RESOURCES

NYT Article mentioned in the episode.

Click here for the free How to Eat Less Water CONDIMENT STORAGE TABLE. It is a printable list of popular condiments that belong in the pantry and those in the refrigerator that can be hung in your kitchen for easy reference.

Download FREE the TEN TIPS to EAT LESS WATER SUMMER PARTY PLANNING GUIDE for all the tips, steps, and info on celebrating like a kitchen activist with your friends and family.

Find gifts designed to serve well-being at the Eat Less Water Shop.

Get a copy of the EAT LESS WATER book.

Reach me at info@eatlesswater.com

RESOURCES + LINKS

•  Watch the PBS segment on Kitchen Activism 
•  Join the 4-week Kitchen Activist group (closes Sunday) 
•  Preorder The Kitchen Activist 
• Start Meal Planning to Save the Planet and Money! started.
• Sign up for my weekly newsletter. 
• Get a copy of the EAT LESS WATER book.
  
  Reach Florencia Ramirez at info@eatlesswater.com

Transcript

Welcome. I'm Florencia Ramirez, a Kitchen Activist, and I'm so glad you're here. Today's topic is called, shop for foods without fossil fuels. Before I really dig into action steps on how you can easily start. Just paying attention to this issue of fossil fuels in our food is just to take a moment to think about what's happening in Maui and to send.   Love and light to the people who have lost. Everything, some people who've lost their lives. I think that the latest count I saw this morning was a hundred people so far have perished in the fire. 

 And the people who are figuring out how to rebuild because their homes are gone, their businesses—so many small businesses. I had the great opportunity to go to Lahina several years back. It was when my oldest daughter, who's now 20, was about one year old. It was such a beautiful small town, mostly wood-framed older buildings, a historical site that you just think will always be there. And that's why we have this feeling of permanence around places around the world that we love.  Or we know about right? We think, oh, Venice, Italy. It's always gonna be there. New York City, Manhattan. It's always going to be there.  

Well, Lahina, it's always going to be there. And then these things happen. And they're gone because no place is immune to climate change. This is truly an event that was caused by climate change. The fires that came in so fast, so hot, so furious were as a result of climate change. 

 I was glad to see many breaking stories on what happened in Maui naming it because it has taken this long. For these events to be spoken in the same breath climate change is part of the reason for these types of very extreme weather events. I really liked the way Reuters specifically handled the breaking news coverage of the story when they said.  

"Human-caused climate change driven by fossil fuel use is increasing the frequency and intensity of such extreme weather events. Scientists say having long warned and  government officials must slash emissions to prevent climate catastrophe." 

That is really important because we need the news and these different platforms that have such huge audiences to connect the dots for us that these events, these tragedies, are a result of fossil fuels. That fossil fuels are causing these extreme weather events. 

While this is playing out in front of our eyes, what's happening in Maui and across the world right now, wildfires are just wiping people's livelihoods and lives away.   There are also things to celebrate, and it's really important that we, at least for myself, that I need to know the good things going on because otherwise it starts to feel heavy. Then you start to feel like, what can I do? It's just it's too late. , there's nothing I can do that can really unwrite this story. 

 We must pay attention to what's at stake, right? A. A few episodes back. I asked the question. What's at stake? It's really important as an activist. I always ask that question. So that we are. Staying on track that we're continuing to move forward.  We continue to keep,  the action part alive and well. 

In our daily round, when I answered the question for myself, it was everything. Everything is at stake. When we talk about climate change, and we saw that in Maui 
but at the same time, we also need to celebrate our successes and our gains, and put energy and thought into things we want to grow. So, at the same time, we're watching what's going on in Maui unfold there's a ruling that came down in Montana. I don't know if you have heard about it, but there's a great article in the New York Times about it. I will have the link to the article in the show notes. 

But the cases held versus Montana.  It alleged that the state violated the constitutional rights of 16 youth plaintiffs ages two to 18 years old.   Specifically, the lawsuit claimed that Montana had violated the plaintiff's right to a clean and healthful environment because that is what is stated in the constitution of Montana.  

The state violated the rights of these plaintiffs by passing a law that barred the state from considering the climate impacts of potential fossil fuel projects. The state had never rejected a fossil fuel project before. So the attorneys, on behalf of these plaintiffs, argued successfully.  So that is phenomenal.  A huge success.  We will see if it holds up with the Montana Supreme Court. It may even go to this, our Supreme Court. But it's important these conversations are being had in courtrooms. In boardrooms in our kitchens.  

We need to have these conversations everywhere and connect the dots between fossil fuels and climate change and these terrible, tragic events that we're watching unfold in real-time.  

So that brings me to today's topic: how do you shop for foods without fossil fuels?  Let me give you some statistics to chew on. Before I dive into the action part.  Which is agriculture contributes, 20% of greenhouse gas emissions.   We get these numbers, and sometimes it's hard, at least for me to understand them, but then I understand them when I see it in a smaller unit. And that's why water footprint for me is so helpful because you could say.  

 We're using 70% of all water to grow our food, which tells me it takes 11 gallons of water to make one slice of bread, 32 gallons of water to produce one glass of wine, or 1800 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. For me, you have this big number. And then break that down into units that I understand. 

So when we talk about fossil fuels and how much greenhouse gas emissions are caused by food production, conventional food production.  Then you tell me if you produce a two-pound box of breakfast cereal, it is equivalent to burning half a gallon of gasoline. So then that, I understand right, one box of breakfast cereal requires half a gallon of gasoline . And then the question is, well, where is that coming from?  We tend to think that most fossil fuels, when it comes to food production, result from transporting food across the globe.  And yes, that's one part of it, but that is just a small piece. Most of that is coming from pesticides. , petroleum-based fertilizers. Farm equipment. 

Overwhelmingly, greenhouse gas emissions are not coming from the transport of food, but in the production, in the production of food. The average family of four in the developed world uses 930 gallons of gasoline a year for food. We can compare that to something else that we understand,  1,070 gallons of gasoline is required to fuel the cars in the average family of four.  And again, for the average food consumption of that same size family, it's 930 gallons.  

How do we strip fossil fuels out of our food? How can we move away from that?  And it comes down to who are we aligning with? What type of food production are we aligning with?  In my book, EAT LESS WATER, I'm answering the question of how to waste less water and eat less water through food choices.  The same ways we can use less water with food production are exactly the same as how can we use less fossil fuels in our food. It is organic, organic, organic food. Really?  And regenerative, like these small-scale farmers who are growing food, healthy food, more nutritious food for us.  At the same time, it is moving away from fossil fuels because it's moving away from fossil fuels because they're not using petroleum-based fertilizers, and they are not using because that is disallowed in organic agriculture. Nor are they using chemical pesticides, which are a product of petroleum. And more and more are moving away from farm equipment fueled by fossil fuels. You know, things like bringing solar panels and other renewable energies onto the farm. Those are the things that we need to look for and reward our food producers with our dollars. Right. 

Dollars are energy.  Currency is just energy converted into money. Right? So when we support agriculture that is moved away from fossil fuels.  We're doing that by giving them that energy in the form of currency so that they can continue their energy of producing this food because they can't do it without us. 

 In my book, one of the chapters is called RICE AND WATER.  It featured a phenomenal farm that was in Cajun country,  Louisiana. Kurt, the farmer, rice farmer, produced rice without fossil fuels.  

 He was so passionate about the food that he was growing and its nutrition. It produced food for his community and had much lower levels of arsenic, which is an issue when rice is grown in flooded fields.  

But he had to close down his farm because there just wasn't the infrastructure to support the work he was doing. In order for him to get paid for organic rice,  he had to sell it in Texas and travel that distance from where he was located in Louisiana and  then there was a fee for crossing the border to Texas.

In other words, the infrastructure wasn't there to support him and his organic rice. Taking it to the farmer's market in New Orleans was a financial stream, but not enough. So we need to support these farmers at our farmer's markets and also find them online. 

Buy their product in bulk, which I did before he went out of business. I got a 20-pound bag of rice, and then, unfortunately, I can't do that anymore. He's one farmer who represents so many other people who are passionate and committed to producing food without fossil fuels. 

But they can't do it alone. And then, eventually, their bank accounts run dry. They need energy. Our energy from currency to continue to do this work. So when we go to the farmer's market, We are kitchen activists. When we shop for foods. That don't have petroleum we are partnering with a solution so that things like what we see in Maui can't happen anymore. We want those things to stop and the way that , we can do it simply is by changing what we're doing in our kitchens. And a  big way is to shop for organic foods, that are regenerative. And I keep using that word regenerative, and you're going to keep hearing me say it because, essentially, it means agriculture that is giving back more than it takes. It is not extractive the way that fossil fuels are extractive. It's extracting resources. It's extracting the health of the communities around it. It's extracting water that's part of the whole drilling process and then, as a result, causing pollution. 

And that's what the young people, the plaintiffs in Montana argued successfully to the judge in that courtroom was there. constitutional rights are not honored when you say that everybody in Montana. Deserves a clean and healthful environment. If the state is not looking at the climate impacts from fossil fuels. And we need to look at as consumers, as individual kitchen activists, we can look at what are the climate impacts of the food that we're purchasing.  When it's conventionally grown it is part of this extractive fossil fuels agricultural system that has to change. It has to change. There's no way around it. We need to change the way we're eating. We need to think differently about our contributions and how we can contribute to the solution. 

Our kitchen is a fantastic and powerful place to begin. Because it's something that we're doing all the time. We are always shopping for food every week, every day. We're shopping for food. So, if we can harness that power for good and really start to think about how we can eat more nutritious foods, which, by the way, also happens to be better for the environment.  So there's a relationship between the food that we bring in when it's more healthy for rivers, for soil, for air. 

When it has lower greenhouse gas emissions, it is also better for our bodies. 

So the action step is: When you go to the farmers market, go to the farmer's market first. Shop your farmer's market. Shop those farms, shop those ice cream shops that are purchasing organic milk to make their ice cream, or that coffee roaster who is directly purchasing beans from small farms that are growing shade-grown coffee, for example, that is grown without fossil fuels.  Or the baker who is fermenting their sourdough using organic grains. So all of those little things add up to big things. It does. And if you and I are doing things differently in the kitchen every day we will change this world with what we eat. 

Hopefully, at this point, you're thinking, yes, yes, I want to shop for foods without fossil fuels, but Florencia how do I do that? If I go to the farmer's market how do I know it's organic? You ask questions. You go to the vendor; you ask them if they grow foods with pesticides with chemical pesticides.  And they'll tell you, they'll tell you yes or no.  You can ask the question do you use petroleum-based fertilizers? So those are the two main questions that I ask.  

And what you'll hear is that oftentimes, these small farms that you find at the farmer's market are not certified organic with a third-party certification. Organic is important when you're in the aisles of a grocery store and there's nobody there to ask the question to. That's when it's important, but when you're at a farmer's market or in a small shop, you can ask them directly these questions. Then it doesn't become as important to have a third party to tell me whether or not this is organic. I'm the third party. Asking those questions. And then the thing about it is you only have to go through that process once. So you ask those questions, and often they'll say it's pesticide-free because it's not certified organic. As you listen more to this podcast, or if you grab my book, EAT LESS WATER, you'll get even more dialed in with details about what questions you can ask specific to different types of food production. For example, what are the questions you would ask if you're buying coffee beans versus cheese? They're not exactly the same questions, but the overarching question would be, are you using chemicals? Are you using petroleum-based fertilizers?  And if they say no to both of those things, then at least for me, you get my business. 

And you only have to ask those questions once. When I go to my farmer's market, my favorite is the one closest to me, the Channel Islands farmer's market. It's right on the Harbor in Oxnard. I love it. I love, love, love that one. It's on Sundays.  

And I already have my go-to people for everything because I've already had the conversations. And then it's great because, through the years, I have come to know them. They've come to know me too. You start to build these relationships, and then the food no longer os anonymous, but rather is attached to the people who produce them. And they start to tell stories. When I walk into my kitchen and open my refrigerator, for example,  My food tells stories because much of what I have in there is attached to the people and places that I purchased them, and that also has its special richness.  

I'll leave you with that action this week—the step of shopping for foods without fossil fuels. It is climate action. It is the best way I can think of for us to empower ourselves—to be part of the solution, to watch what's happening, to see what's at stake unfold in real-time in Hawaii and around the world.  

But we can do something about it, and we can do something about it today, right now, with your next meal. Thank you so much for joining me on this journey. I will see you again next Wednesday. It is my birthday tomorrow. I'll be 50, and my birthday wish is that you would simply review this podcast. 

Star it. , leave a written review. It really does help for other people to find us. And if you have read, eat less water, if you would leave me a review on Amazon or good reads, that would be phenomenal. So thank you. So so much.