About Nutritious and Natural

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There are thousands of ways to improve the current relationship between our food system and the environment. I have chosen three topics to ponder and address: environmental impact, nutrition, and food waste. About ⅓ of all food that is grown in the world is wasted, and that number is even higher in the United States. Yet, there is an increasing number of people in the world who don’t have access to nutritionally rich foods, including in the United States. These two facts do not line up. How can we both overproduce food and also have such a high rate of food insecurity? 

My goal is to provide tools to help you understand this question and these issues in more detail, as well as learn ways to address them. The purpose of this site is to explain these issues, how they are caused, and what we can do to combat them. For more detail please see Environmental Impact, Nutrition, and Food Waste, and don’t forget to check out some of my tasty recipes!

In order to achieve my goals of reducing environmental impact, optimizing nutrition, and limiting food waste, I am promoting a way of eating that combines reducetarian and local approaches. Reducetarian efforts work to reduce the consumption of animal products without cutting them out fully. Since animal agriculture has such a large environmental footprint, I think that the most realistic way for an ordinary person to address this would be by decreasing their animal product consumption as much as they can. Additionally, combining this way of eating with local produce and frozen foods would create a nutritious diet filled with a variety of fresh foods. Frozen foods are nutritionally beneficial because they are picked when they are ripe, and can remain preserved for a long period of time. Local farms are generally smaller and more resilient to disruptions such as COVID-19 because they have a short supply chain. This reducetarian and local combination is both nutritionally rich as well as environmentally favorable.