Foodprint.org is a website that offers tips on shopping sustainably for food.
Sustainable shopping includes where you shop for food, what you buy, how you use food, and how you discard of it.
The best places to shop sustainably are local food markets. If you can grow food yourself, that’s even better. Local foods have a lower carbon footprint due to a lower carbon emission associated with shipping.
All foods and products have a different carbon footprint. Even two different brands of the same product have different carbon footprints, so understanding what we are buying and where it comes from is important for sustainable shopping! Food labels tell us a lot about where our food is from and how it was produced, but they are not always the easiest to understand or read. Foodprint.org provides a wonderful, in-depth look at reading food labels at this link https://foodprint.org/eating-sustainably/food-label-guide/
Cooking at home is a great opportunity to lower your carbon footprint. Eating out or buying prepackaged meals means that a lot of the sourcing, packaging, and ingredients are out of your control. It can be fun to learn and try new recipes, and even if its difficult to get started, it is rewarding to try a new recipe and love it! This blog has many resources for sustainable recipes that contain little to no meat products and consist of local ingredients; however, you can make every meal more sustainable by reducing meat in meals, using the parts of veggies you normally toss (like stems of broccoli or cauliflower), or composting leftovers. On average people throw away more than 25% of the food they buy.
Sustainable shopping and cooking often means saving money through using more of what you buy and finding creative ways to use leftover ingredients.