Since moving from the campus dorms to off campus, I no longer have a meal plan with cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner that is just a five-minute walk away. Luckily, my roommate has a car, so we go grocery shopping together every week. Because of my busy course load and extracurriculars, I usually buy foods to meal prep on the weekend and then eat throughout the week. Lately, I’ve had oatmeal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and something different every week for dinner.
In this zero-waste eating challenge, I am trying to keep most of my eating habits the same. I am fairly confident I can buy the ingredients for my oatmeal without packaging, but it seems like it’s time to find some new recipes for lunch and dinner. One question I have is, is it possible to buy meat without packaging and labels that go into the trash? I usually buy frozen chicken, because it’s cheaper and lasts a long time, but that comes in a plastic bag. Even the unfrozen kind is almost always packaged with a Styrofoam bottom and plastic wrap cover.
Maybe I can find something at the store without packaging that goes into the trash. If not, it’s not the end of the world if I do not eat meat for two weeks. The whole point of this challenge is for environmental reasons, and meat production is responsible for literally tons of greenhouse gas emissions. I like this graphic (below) from a 2019 Nature study because it shows how eating less meat can make a difference, not just cutting meat out completely.
In this article, a nutrition scientist at Stanford, says that it does not matter whether you are getting your protein from plant or animal sources, as they are equally adequate in terms of health needs. He also acknowledges that it is not necessary to switch to a vegetarian or vegan diet, but he does recommend eating less protein in general (the average American usually eats about twice the needed amount) and shifting the source of some protein to plant-based.
In his research paper, a 25% less and 25% shift in protein consumption would result in 40% lower carbon dioxide emissions from food production, 8% lower greenhouse gas emissions, and a 10% decrease in water consumption. Clearly, meat is not the best for the environment, but beef is by far the worst culprit. This study found that beef production requires 28 times more land, six times more fertilizer, and 11 times more water compared to pork, chicken, dairy, and eggs combined.
While scrolling through pages and pages of recipes, I noticed a lot of them have meat and the ones that don’t are not filled with protein. Based on the scientifically established Dietary Reference Intake, women need about 46 g of protein every day. This can be easily achieved through a chicken breast, cup of Greek yogurt, and 2 tbs of peanut butter, as seen in the examples given here by WebMD. Vegetarians should also be conscious of getting enough vitamin B12. Aside from meat, common sources of B12 are eggs and dairy. In my normal diet, I usually have a glass of milk and a bowl of Greek yogurt. But can I still buy these things on my challenge?
Regarding milk, I found this website that tells you if traditional milk cartons can be recycled in your curbside program. Seems like they’re cleared for Ann Arbor! If I remember correctly, the yogurt I get always has the foil lid on top and a white paper that has to be thrown out, so I don’t think I can purchase that, which is sad because I really love eating granola with it. It is important to check these things because contamination, meaning things that don’t go in the recycling or unwashed recyclable items, can send an entire batch of recycling to the landfill. Apparently, about 25% of all recycling picked up by Waste Management is contaminated to the point that it is trashed.
Eventually, I found this recipe for quinoa stuffed peppers and this recipe for coconut red lentil daal. Looks delicious! The daal recipe is actually from a vegan blogger, and that was one of her recipes she recommended for high amounts of protein. I’m not one to count macronutrients, but I should be getting enough protein from those grains and beans. Regarding modifications of the recipes, I’ll plan to add avocado to the peppers and peas to the lentils.
Now, I’m ready to head to the grocery store. I have my reusable bags ready and some reusable containers to buy foods in bulk.
Most of my containers are a mix of random plastic containers that I’ve saved from food packaging, like yogurt, take-out, and jarred foods. This reminds me about an important point about reducing, reusing, and recycling. When switching to reusable containers, we should go with what we have first and should not focus on getting new fancy containers that look better because they still do the same job.
Similarly, since zero waste is about using up what you already have, I will not be buying standard pantry items, like spices or oils, that I already own. For all other ingredients, I am planning to get as much as possible from Kroger (it’s usually cheaper) and anything else from Ann Arbor’s People's Food Co-op, which will probably be for bulk grain foods.
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