A Hearty Bowl of Realization

As a major foodie, I think a lot about what I eat. Because of this, there are many different factors that come into play when making my food choices:

1. Nutrition: having been raised by doctors, I always consider how good (or bad) for me the food I'm about to eat is. This certainly isn't to say I always eat healthy foods; I just always think about how the food I'm eating is going to affect my body, both now and in the long term.
2. Cost: as a college student trying to live on a budget, cost is often a factor in my food purchases. It's sometimes hard to justify buying the fresh produce for example, when the frozen is much cheaper. The cost factor comes into play a lot during the organic versus not organic choice as well.
3. Convenience: also as a college student, one of the biggest things I lack is time. Because of this, I will often consider the convenience of foods. Frozen foods or preprocessed foods are great for this, but they don't necessarily match up with some of my other considerations, like nutrition or environmental issues. Personally, I would much rather cook fresh food every day, but my schedule just doesn't allow it. Convenience affects my daily food choices as well as my food shopping choices. When I'm trying to decide what to eat during the day, it usually comes down to what's in the fridge.
4. Taste/Cravings: probably one of the biggest factors in my food choices is what I want to eat. As I mentioned before, I love food a lot so I have a hard time ignoring my cravings. I never seem to be satisfied until I've eaten what I want. In attempts to justify this, I always quote the idea that you have cravings because your body knows what nutrients it needs. Sure this probably isn't entirely true, but I still tend to eat what I want.
5. Environmental issues: I commonly consider this factor when making my food choices, but it tends to get drowned under all the other considerations. I've know so much of the information about how our food choices affect the environment. I do my best to eat in a way that harms the environment least. But at the same time, it's difficult to do. Our current food system is so engrained that I feel trapped in it sometimes.

It's almost impossible to satisfy all of these considerations at once. Different ones win out at different times. For example, my decision to eat mostly vegetarian was driven by nutrition and environmental factors. When I drive to the grocery store and buy off-brand products, cost and convenience are winning over. But when I make it to the farmers market, nutrition and environment (and just sheer enjoyment) are on top. The motives underlying my food decisions vary so often, I constantly struggled to figure out what is most important when deciding what to eat.

Of the foods I've eaten in the past couple days, the one that probably has the greatest environmental impact was the bowl of cereal I had for breakfast this morning: Berry Berry Kix with Silk Soymilk and bananas on top. As I was sitting there eating my cereal I looked at the ingredients, which consisted of three different forms of corn (whole grain corn, corn meal, and corn syrup) as well as a bunch of different sweeteners. It was essentially a puffed piece of sweetened corn, which is one of our biggest industrial agriculture products. The soymilk is made primarily of soybeans. Although the package claims they are non-GMO beans, they were still likely harvested in an industrial way. Finally, the banana was probably imported from some far off tropical place. My meal was not at all local, small scale, or organic. For such a seemingly simple meal, it was very representative of our dependence on factory farming and on the luxury of being able to import goods from far away, both at a high environmental cost.

In a world where so many underlie our food decisions and even a simple meal can cause so much harm, the real question is, what can we eat?