We all need food to sustain our lives. But there’s a lot to think about when we eat because our choice of food and our eating habits can have huge impacts on our environment and our future.
While some people concern more about food taste, enjoyment and total dining experience, some others advocate the principle of eating sustainably, which should outweigh other factors in our dining routines. It becomes a heated topic of debate in recent years. The Campus Sustainability Office (CSO) therefore staged a webinar to examine the various aspects of sustainable eating with the University community.
As suggested by CSO’s invited speaker, we should pay more attention to the food we eat – not their presentation and taste, but how and where people grow and get the food to our tables. In modern, affluent societies, most of our food comes from industrial farms and not from natural farms. Do we have sufficient knowledge of how these industrial farms operate? Will they be using chemicals excessively that bring about catastrophes to the neighbouring environment? Besides, modern people eat more processed food than those years ago. Are we certain of the risks that the processed food may bring us? Taking much-processed food may increase the danger of getting chronic health problems such as cancer or diabetes. Last but not least, people tend to order and buy too much food, setting aside the problem of dumping overloading quantities of food waste into the landfills. All these combine to tell that we are in fact generating negative impacts on our environment and our future whenever we eat.
We may not be able to change the world in a minute, but we can start our sustainable eating habits ourselves and spread this message to our family and peers. We should engage more neighbours to join us and be more cautious about the food we choose and show our understanding of the interwoven relationship between eating and the environment.
