Allison Campbell Jensen

In March, a story about Minnesota Twins player Bryon Buxton “carrying more bulk, moxie” caught my eye. During the off season, Star Tribune’s Jim Souhan wrote, Buxton “would wake early, eat two 8-ounce steaks and a dozen eggs, work out, then repeat the meal. He consumed 10,000 calories a day so he can hit balls over walls and survive encounters with them. ‘Easy to say,’ Buxton said. ‘Hard to do. I’m not scaling back, not going to avoid running into walls. I put on 10 pounds for a reason. The walls got me the last few seasons.’”

Me, I’m not a professional athlete. What I am is a 61-year-old who probably has spent more time chewing the fat about food than many, because I am often the family cook, because of occasional worries about calories and, because I like to eat well, I think about food several times a day, every day.

I know that food carries baggage—family, culture, trends, emotions and carbon. You may have heard the news in early August that a “United Nations panel says countries around the world need to adapt food systems to limit climate change, including adopting more sustainable agriculture practices and altering diets to eat less red meat,” ABC reported. “Agriculture and other uses of land around the world contribute more than 23% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the report and warming from climate change could start to make food more expensive as heat, drought or extreme rains make crops less productive.” How we feed ourselves relates to the climate crisis, which is transforming our planet.

The Amazon is burning up and we are rightly fired up but frustrated. It’s hard to know what to do to help. Yet, as agriculture has been cited as one of the reasons that the huge Amazonian rain forest is under threat, my suggestion is to look to our own eating habits. Here are five things we can all do to reduce our food-associated carbon footprint.

First: Don’t waste food.

Second: Pause, think, plan ahead.

Third: Buy, eat, drink locally.

Fourth: Grow flowers and bushes and trees for pollinators. 

Fifth is the big question, for us carnivores: How about those steaks that Buxton was chowing down to bulk up? Do we have to give up beef?

First: Don’t waste food. Did you know that 40 percent of the food in the United States goes from farm to trash can (or, we hope, compost bin)—uneaten? This statistic was shared by Vice President Al Gore while he was interviewing agricultural experts during the Climate Reality Project Leadership Training in Minneapolis Aug. 2-4, 2019. As you can imagine, that figure also means wasting 40 percent of the inputs, like people power (labor and intellectual resources) and fossil fuels used for farm equipment, transportation and packaging.

Buy less food; eat your leftovers; and put your unsalvageable food waste in the compost. (Thanks, Michael Pollan and Ginger Pinson!)

Second: Pause, think, plan ahead. Take the long view. In the great state of Minnesota, our winters can seem long—okay, they are long. In the darker months, finding fruits and vegetables that haven’t made the long, greenhouse-gassy trip from the Southern Hemisphere? Challenging.

Yet our sister-in-law in Washington State harvests basketfuls of blueberries in season and has a freezerful for her year-round breakfasts. We not only have cherry pie from our backyard tree, I also make jam. Edmond, in Minneapolis, has transformed most of his yard into a vegetable garden. His adventures in putting up food include a panoply of pickles.

I have other ideas. How about you?

Third: Buy, eat, drink locally. Do I have time to get to the farmer’s market this Saturday? Do I have to drive? Could I go on my bike? On the Green Line? Could I combine my usual three grocery trips a week into two? How about going out? Where should we go for lunch? The “freaky fast” place across the street? Or the co-op that offers mostly locally grown foods? Shall we go out for a drink? How about a local brewery? How far do we have to drive to get there? Could we bring some friends and share the carbon?

Fourth: Grow flowers and bushes and trees for pollinators. Everything is connected—we need to feed our insects, not only the charismatic honeybees but also all the others—so that they can pollinate our foods. My cherries, sweet corn growing at the U of M’s St. Paul’s campus, the tomatoes in our church Giving Garden—they all need the “services” that pollinating insects provide. And that’s just in my neighborhood!

Fifth is the big question, for us carnivores: How about those steaks that Buxton was chowing down to bulk up? Do we have to give up beef? Well, according to Project Drawdown, which offers 100 positive solutions to address the climate crisis, it depends on how the cattle are grazed. “Where original grasslands are still intact, they are abundant lands with carbon-rich soils. They benefit from the activity of migratory herds that cluster tightly for protection; munch grasses to the crown; disturb the soil with their hooves, intermixing their urine and feces; and then move on.”

Earth-friendly managed grazing practices rank #19 on the drawdown.org list. If implemented, managed grazing would cost $50 million, saving $735 million and keeping 16.34 gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere by 2050.

But what about methane from those cattle? Well, contrary to popular myth, they don’t fart methane, they burp it, said Jonathan Foley, Director of Project Drawdown, during the Climate Reality Project Leadership Training. Either way, it appears that they are having some trouble digesting their feed. Maybe if, instead of corn, they grazed on the grasslands they’ve adapted to over thousands of years of husbandry, they’d burp less?

Anyway, to me, grass-fed beef tastes better. I eat not only to fuel my body but also to enjoy my meal. So, what’s for dinner?

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Walking inside a giant Tupperware bowl, I could not see the mountains to the north of Pasadena. The air pollution was so bad in 1990 that a day clear enough to see Catalina Island from Griffith Park rated a big photo on the front of the in the Los Angeles Times metro section. This was news, folks! Drive-by shootings didn’t make the front of that section that year–unless a child was killed by gunfire.

My asthmatic first husband would walk the mile from his work on the Cal Tech campus to our apartment, then lie down for a half hour to regain his breath. When I would walk to the library, people driving their cars would stare at me. All those people and yet I felt a little lonely on those empty sidewalks.

I hear the skies have cleared in the Los Angeles basin because of stricter emissions controls on cars. That’s good news. The bad news is, in Los Angeles and Paris and Mexico City and Beijing and the Twin Cities, we are putting 110 million tons of manmade global warming pollution into the atmosphere every single day. Al Gore, founder of the Climate Reality Project, Nobel Prize recipient and former Vice President of the United States, shared this fact as he trained new Climate Reality Leaders like me at a recent meeting in Minneapolis. Greenhouse gases, unlike the Los Angeles smog of nearly 30 years ago, are not visible to the eye.

Gah! Given the scale of this global climate crisis, what can an individual like myself do?

Well, I can make choices–on my commute, at the grocery, when I am traveling. Perhaps you’ve heard that Greta Thunberg, the brave Swede who is leading a global student movement to fight the climate crisis, is traveling by sail from Europe to America specifically to avoid the carbon costs of air travel. It’s not cushy, sailing on a yacht built for racing–creature comforts came last in its design. Yet she is living by her principles, which is why she is such a powerful leader.

Every day, I have the chance to make a small difference for the planet. A couple of days ago, I was going to the garage to get a vehicle for a trip. Playing with his bicycle in the driveway, grandson Presley said, “Oh, I will get out of your way.” “No worries,” I replied. “I am taking my bicycle.”

Love your planet. Make choices to counter this climate crisis. Take your bicycle, take the bus, eat locally (when possible) and, yes, think globally. The generation that includes my grandson? They are watching and learning.

Image: My husband and grandson leaving the Roseville library on Tuesday evening.

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