My Papaya

Like Ashley, when I am initially deciding what to eat I think about what I am in the mood for. What a luxury it is to be able to decide what to eat and when we want to eat it. After I rule out certain tastes, I think about balancing the meal. I make sure that I have covered all of my bases- protein, carbs, veggies, and fruit if I haven’t yet had any that day. If I am making the meal at home, I know where some of my ingredients are coming from. I buy my vegetables at the farmer’s market on 18th street on the weekends, and I buy the discarded cheese (no it has not gone bad!) from restaurants that have leftover stock during a menu-change. I must sheepishly admit that my motives for buying my vegetables and cheese where I do are primarily for taste and price; the environmental upside to these decisions is more of a convenient coincidence. I recently switched over to the vegetarian side of the isle, and have cut meat out of my diet with the exception of occasional fish. I began to have a difficult time digesting heavy meats and felt slightly nauseous after every hamburger, and the fact that meat is processed to an extreme and over-packaged and shipped to my grocery store only reinforced my desire to go veggie.

Of everything I have eaten today, the papaya I splurged on has probably had the greatest environmental impact. Though at first this seemed counter-intuitive to me, seeing as it is a fruit fresh from the earth and not a processed slab of sirloin steak, I researched the origins of my delicious fruit. Papayas are grown and cultivated in tropic regions, however my specific papaya was born and raised in either Florida or Hawaii (according to the species). While the environment was spared the shipment from a Caribbean island, my papaya still had to be packaged, preserved, and shipped to my grocery store all the way from the far reaches of the States. After researching all of the foods I ate today I realized that not only is it difficult to eat foods that are environmentally friendly, but it is also no easy task to find out where each item on your plate came from and what it went through to get onto your fork.