Help! Is my quinoa killing the planet?

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/apr/03/health-food-fads-quinoa-guilt-free-diet

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I was a very unsophisticated and sheltered child when it came to food – the first person in my family to buy a bulb of garlic, or go to university. It was there, in 1998, that I first heard the words couscous and hummus. When I got to London three years later, my mind was blown by supermarket sushi. Since then, I’ve graduated to trying every new food or diet that comes along. There isn’t a juice I haven’t swigged, a carb I haven’t replaced with an improbable alternative. These days, I could give Gwyneth a run for her money.

Over the last two years, I’ve dabbled with paleo, cacao, almond milk, seaweed, aloe vera and coconut water. My friends tell me I’m a “health hipster”. And what’s wrong with that? But then I learned that my chia seed addiction might have a real impact on the global food industry: this year, analysts from Credit Suisse warned that the consumer migration from carbs to proteins would damage the baking and milling industry, all because people are having ham and eggs for breakfast instead of Shreddies or toast.

And there’s worse: what about the environment? What if my taste for goji berries is leading to the drowning of baby narwhals? OK, I made that bit up, but every week there’s another report about the hidden impact of what you eat on planet Earth. I started to wonder whether, in helping myself, I was harming the planet. So I went on a quest to find a food fad that won’t harm the environment. This is what I learned.

The day I milked my nuts

What do you do with your almonds? If the answer is nibble them in biscuits at Christmas with a wee nip of advocaat, get up to speed, Grandma. The thing to do now is to milk them (or “mylk”, as some spell it), and guzzle it by the pint. Various Instagram-based health gurus swear by it.

I tried milking my nuts with an old pair of tights and a rolling pin. It was really hard, took ages and I didn’t get much milk for my mushing. Happily for me and my underwear drawer, you can also buy the stuff on the high street.

Last year, almond milk overtook soya milk in the non-dairy market (a market that rose 155% between 2011 and 2013, as people decided cow milk was dead to them). That’s a lot of the little brown nuggets, each requiring a lot of water and energy not just to grow but to be turned into milk. And this rapidly expanding industry is now reportedly draining California dry of water. The state has seen a twofold increase in plantations as it attempts to provide 80% of the world’s almonds. At the end of last year, the industry was so concerned that it couldn’t keep up with demand, it issued an alert for an almond shortage.

“Obviously, if you’re making your own almond milk, it’s far more sustainable,” says nutrition expert and raw food cook Laura Coxeter. “And it’s healthier, because it’s not pasteurised and hasn’t got lots of other ingredients in it.” Unlike a lot of us, Coxeter can be bothered to make her own almond milk (with water, in a food processor, straining it through linen). She thinks if we all did the same, it would be easier on the environment. “You have to decide whether convenience is the most important thing or not,” she says, which is where I come unstuck: even in the health-food world, convenience is king. I put my soggy almondy tights in the bin and pour myself a glass of cow.

Can I forage my own fungi?

I was innocently picking samphire with some friends on the Essex coast, between pubs, when one of them started talking about money: “You know [insert name of fancy restaurant] would pay a fortune for what you’ve just picked?” Really? I started fantasising about having my own samphire-picking business, did some very rough calculations, and worked out it would be more profitable than teaching, managing a shop or being a freelance writer. Then I realised how much time I’d have to spend out in the cold.

Foraging has wholesome vibes – you’re just the hunter-gatherer of nature’s fruits – but you must have permission. In 2013, there were 20 successful prosecutions for illegal fungi-picking in Epping Forest, with bags of mushrooms going for £50 a kilo. It turns out foraging is putting some of our rarest plants in danger of extinction, and other flowers and fauna can be trampled in the process.

The problem is global. In Quebec, over-foraging and a thriving black market has put ramp (a wild leek) in danger. And in California’s Redwood national park, foragers are now permitted only one gallon of hazelnuts and berries each. I decide to let someone else pick my greens.

Sausages: to fake them or not?

There are loads of really good reasons for giving up meat: not wanting to eat things with cute faces; not wanting to eat things that are sentient; looking at a carcass, imagining your cat and feeling sad. Then there’s environmental vegetarianism, the kind that allows you smugly to lecture your dining companions.

The received wisdom is that eating meat is bad for the environment. “Oh, yah, we all eat too much meat,” I’ve heard myself say over a steak. Feeling bad, and also trying to save money, I fill up my shopping basket with that most hallowed item of vegetarian cuisine: the fake meat product. It’s easy going veggie when you can just substitute your meaty treats with Quorn burgers, soy sausages and marinated tofu. It all tastes pretty good, too, which partly explains why last year Quorn announced its fastest-ever growth period: for the first time, non-vegetarians outnumbered vegetarian customers. They even persuaded Mo Farah (a meat eater) to star in their adverts.

However, a study in 2010 showed that not eating meat could also damage the planet. The WWF and Cranfield University report warned that the environmental impact of making fake sausages might be greater than making a real one: “A switch from beef and milk to highly refined livestock product analogues such as tofu and Quorn could actually increase the quantity of arable land needed to supply the UK.” Not only could this risk more deforestation, but it takes a lot of energy to make these highly processed substitutes. On the other hand, most of the intensive farming of soy (leading to deforestation) is to feed livestock (for meat) rather than to make veggie sausages.

I look at my fridge full of fake meat. I decide that it’s probably still a good idea to swap a real banger for a fraud every now and again.

Not such a lovely bunch of coconuts...

Until last year, I was sure water was the best way to hydrate. “That’s handy,” I thought, “I’ve got taps full of it.” But H2O doesn’t cut it any more, unless it’s got something extra, be that watermelon, cactus or aloe vera – which is perfectly lovely if you love gulping down your water with phlegmy bits in it. And, it turns out, I do: I’m hooked. (Apart from corn water, which tastes like something you might drink while minesweeping at a party where people have been putting fags out in beer cans.)

But the benefits of such drinks being “super-hydrators”, packed with nutrients and electrolytes, may well have been exaggerated (coconut water manufacturers Vita Coco settled a $10m lawsuit two years ago, over allegedly misleading nutritional claims). Meanwhile, the huge surge in demand for all coconut products, including oil, flour and milk, is taking its toll on workers doing the dangerous job of collecting coconuts for very little money.

Coconut water companies buy the coconuts for “virtually nothing”, a Mintel report claimed last year, and NGOs have raised concerns that, as profits boom, farmers are not seeing an increase in wages. This is not something I’m willing to play a part in for slightly off-tasting agua.

Quinoa: the only way is Essex

Coconut isn’t the only newly hip ingredient driving up prices abroad. Quinoa, now appearing in everything from salad to pancakes to porridge, is usually grown in Bolivia, where it is a large part of the national diet. But high demand has inflated the price, meaning it’s now cheaper for Bolivians to eat imported food. The only option is to find British-farmed quinoa, which is what Pret a Manger and others are also doing. I get mine from Essex.

What do you want on your paleo pizza?

Last year, my Facebook feed had a 100% increase in photos of pizzas made with cauliflower bases, because that was the year paleo went mainstream.

At face value, paleo is basically about make-believing you live in the Paleolithic era; an era that ended 10,000 years ago, pre-dating modern agriculture, baguettes and Wheat Crunchies. It could be the punchline in a sketch about an older person banging on about how things were better and simpler in their day, but it’s not: it’s a lifestyle choice, based on the premise that we are not genetically evolved to consume modern-day food.

The massive theoretical drawback to paleo is that 10,000 years was a really long time ago and, actually, we have evolved. In fact, to return to that era, millions alive today would have to die, because without agriculture, we couldn’t sustain the size of the global population. Like getting milk out of nuts, making pizza bread out of cauliflower requires lots of squelching. I tried another paleo alternative for normal food – seaweed instead of spaghetti. I loved it, but within a day the lack of sugar and caffeine was taking its toll, leaving me with a banging headache. To top it off, for something you could probably pick up off the beach, it was just too expensive to be a regular alternative. I held out for all of 72 hours before swigging Coke and eating pasta.

What did I learn? That a month of fad-hopping can have a crippling effect on my bank balance as well as on the planet. I know it’s a massive privilege to play around with my food like this. Sometimes, however, it would be better for the planet if we all just took a breather from new things and remembered that our whims can have an impact. Are we a generation in danger of becoming Charlie And The Chocolate Factory-esque brats, demanding everlasting gobstoppers and roast-dinner chewing gum? Those kids that the Oompa-Loompas shook their heads at? Because those kids all came a cropper in the end