Which is the most sustainable option -- buying local produce or buying organic food? Some say buying local produce is greener because of all the freighting emissions that are avoided. Some say purchasing organic food has more impact because of all the fertilizers and pesticides that weren't used in the growing process. 

So which is best? Well, they're both great options that reduce our destructive impact on the environment. So does is really matter which is best as long as we're understanding the implications and choosing according to budget and personal beliefs? The important thing is that everyone chooses one of the two and starts thinking of the impact each dollar we spend has on the economy and on politics. Determine what's more important and realistic for you, then choose. Let's look at the pros and cons of each option:

Buying Local:

• Freighting emissions and costs are curbed
• You're supporting local farms and businesses
• You might be supporting small local farms that operate 'naturally' if not 'organically' and contribute to maintaining biodiversity in that area.
• Usually the better option on a tight budget
• But make sure it's produced in a way you can support. Buying local GMO's isn't the best!

Buying Organic:

• Environmental impact of fertilizers and pesticides are curbed and not ingested
• Better taste
• Usually a bit more expensive (but don't just rule it out, compare for yourself)
• Farms can be organic but still operate on a huge, monoculture scale that reduces biodiversity

Get into the habit, not just with produce but with each and every purchase you make, of finding out where it was made before you choose your brand. It's clearly marked on every produce price-board and easy to find on all packaging. And when you have the option and the means to buy local, don't think twice! The environmental and economical benifits of buying local make the choice a no-brainer. As with every purchase, weigh your options, decide what's important to you and act. 

Everyone has little vain thoughts sometimes.  And when that little vain voice in your head tells you 'you look fat!', many of us try diets to shed the pounds fast.  Trouble is, diets don't often work the way we'd hoped they would.  But what if there was a diet that could have guaranteed positive effects?  'What's the catch?'  These positive effects will happen to the planet not your body. 'Oh, well that's not really a diet then is it?'.  All vainess aside, we're not talking about a diet as a strict weight-loss regime here.  We're talking about diet in the simpler sense of the word as in 'all the things that one eats'.  Yes, if all you eat is chips and mac n' cheese, that is still 'your diet'.

So, can what we eat really impact the earth that much?  The short answer is yes and to do better we can eat less (a lot less!) red meat and other meat proteins, processed (and usually over-packaged) foods, and revert back to eating more veggies, fruit and other fresh foods.

The union of concerned Scientists says a fully vegetarian diet is the single best thing an individual can do for the planet, in terms of carbon footprint and a sustainable lifestyle.

A complete change of diet is a fairly involved process.  But remember that green living isn't all or nothing.  If you have it in you to change your diet completely, then all the more power to you.  And if all you can realistically see yourself doing is lowering your red meat intake or start buying more local foods, well that's great too.  The important thing is that we all know the impact our choices have and choose according. 

 The raising of cattle and other live-stock is an extremely inniffecient way to feed ourselves.  Beef, for example, like to eat a lot!  For every kilogram of meat produced, the animal was fed 6 kilograms of plant protein!  If you factor in the growing of the grain, the feeding of the cow and the butchering and packing process, 1 kilogram of grain-fed beef used up 100,000 litres of clean water... 100,000 litres of clean water to yield 1 kilogram of packaged beef!  Doesn't seem right does it?   

The environmental impact livestock have on the environment is enormous.  And it's no wonder considering that, in Canada, there are 14 million beef and dairy cattle, 14 million pigs, 10 million turkeys  and, wait for it, 130 million chickens being raised at any one time!  We can only hope they never get their hooves on a copy of George Orwell's 'Animal Farm'!  

168 million head of livestock produce a whole lot of poop.  And all that poop releases toxic gases into the atmosphere such as ammonia, hydrogen sulphide and the greenhouse gas methane.  Worldwide, our livestock accounts for 18% of the worlds greenhouse gases!  That's more than cars, trains and planes!  The poop is usually stored in open air ponds and storage tanks and sometimes the storage systems fail and a lot of poop and its pathogens finds its way to streams or contaminates ground water.  Manure spills have been blamed for killing fish, contaminating coastal areas and affecting the fishing industry.  Ground water contamination from a very small manure leak was blamed for the 2000 e-coli disaster in Walkerton, Ontario which killed 6 people.

On top of all this poop and wasted food and water, there's the drugs.  In Canada, chickens, lambs and pigs can't legally be given growth hormones but cattle can.  These growth hormones are turning up downstream and are altering sex-related traits in fish and other marine life. 

Antibiotics are regularly used in all livestock operations to prevent animals from getting sick.  These antibiotics come out in the animals' feces and are sprayed on fields as fertilizer where they get into the crop and find their way to our tables.  Some believe that these antibiotics could be making humans antibiotic-resistant.

Many lax vegetarians still eat fish as a source of protein and Omega-3.  But don't think that eating fish istead of meat is an environmentally responsible choice.  Over half of the world's stock of wild fish is currently being fished at maximum capacity and around 24% are over-exploited.   According to Environmental Defence 78% of fish stocks are on the verge of collapse because of pollution and overfishing.  So let's all cut back on the amount of fish we're eating.  For a guide to witch seafoods are your more sustainable choices visit www.seachoice.org. 

Whew, that's a lot of bad, but there is some good.  Buying local, organic meat is always a great option if you're not ready to cut meat altogether.  Organic meat is drug-free, the animals are fed organic food and grass-fed (seasonally).  And it's been proven that the animals are healther, not only because they don't get sick as often as other animals but the meat is actually better for human consumption.  They're lower in saturated fats and higher in omega-3 fatty acids.

If you're not into the whole vegetarian thing, another diet that reduces your impact drastically is the 100 mile diet.  Most of your food travels 2500 km to get to you.  When you factor in all that burned fuel, that's a lot of greenhouse gasses released so you can have a mango!  The 100 mile diet is pretty simple (in theory anyway); you only eat and drink what is grown and manufactured within 100 miles (160 KM) of where you live.  Where it gets tricky is in the research.  if you buy a locally grown chicken, you have to make sure the feed it was fed came from a local source as well.  Same goes for all the ingredients in a loaf of bread, or a locally-baked pie.  Remember that sugar isn't a local ingredient!  These strict rules were put in place by the pioneers of the diet who now have a website in place to help lead you brave ones through the 100 mile diet.  www.100milediet.org.

Enough with tha plastic bottles! They don't biodegrade and end up killing and contaminating tons of wildlife.  Bottling water is a stupid idea and the industry is now the root of a lot of grief all over the world. 

Use a reusabe, stainless steel water bottle and a home water filter instead of supporting the big water-bottlers of the world.

Why is water-bottling so bad anyway?  

A very small number of corporations and therefore people (stockholders in these corporations) own ALL of the water-bottling companies in the world!  That is astounding!  The world is a big place with lots of water-bottling plants how can they all be owned by the same 10 coporations? But much more astounding is the fact that they are making hundreds of millions of dollars in profits by selling people something that should be free to everybody in the world.  

In many parts of the world, water is almost free and is treated for drinkability and delivered to homes by a utility company (and if you have internet access and are reading this, I'm venturing to say that you're in the privileged group), .  In these privileged parts of the world, water companies are taking the very same water that everybody already pays for to have delivered in their homes and makes us pay again for it (and at ridiculous prices) for having but it in a plastic bottle for us.  In many case, like if it's called 'reverse-osmosis filtered' water, IT'S TAP WATER IN A BOTTLE!

In other parts of the world, parts that regularly experience heavy drought and low water-quality, where people have to make an effort to get clean water, water-companies are diverting water from streams or are damming streams to collect and treat and bottle the water.  Damming causes huge environmental impacts.  It holds the water upstream and takes it away from ecosystems and environments downstream, it also holds the valuable sediment that the water usually takes with it downstream.  This sediment, instead of serving as nutrients for plants and animals, sits in the reservoir and rots releasing gases and being wasted.  In these parts of the world, something that is in desperately high demand in nature and for people to grow food and stay healthy, is taken out of these environments and either trucked away to be sold elsewhwhere or sold back to the people whom it was just taken from at prices they can't afford.

After reading this, why would you want to support the people who are making astronomical amounts of money, taking from the earth and taking advantage of people by buying water that they put in a bottle for convenience. 

With a little fore-thought all of this can be avoided if you remember to always bring a reusable bottle of filtered water with you when you leave the house.  Whenever you leave the house just remember the basics of survival; food, water and rest and prepare accordingly depending on how long you'll be gone.

Never forget that you are saying YES! to a business or corporation every time you buy their product.  (You're also indirectly saying YES to the owners and stock holders of these businesses and corporations and the sort of people they are in the world)  So spend your money on businesses you know and trust and don't be afraid to dig in to find out weather or not you should trust a business or corporation. 

For more in depth info about the water bottling business see the movie "FLOW". Available at most movie rental stores.

Check out Flow's website.

In any produce section at any grocery store, it's obvious that organic foods are taking off.  Organic produce usually have their own little section with a big "Organics" sign on top so people know exactly where to go if they're looking for Organic foods.. great system.  But say your budget won't allow you to buy organic all the time, what section of the produce department do you go to to avoid Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO)?  If you don't know how to spot them, GMOs blend right into the greenery and are picked up by people who if they had an easy tool to avoid them, would make the effort.

Thankfully, a tool exists to do just this, you just have to know where to look.  There is a universal produce code system, that stemmed from the globalisation of the produce industry and the need to have a standard labelling system, that allows quick and easy differentiation between Organics, GMOs and conventional produce. 

It's very simple.  Every produce code is 4 digits long.  For example the code for bananas is 4011.  If a food is organic they will add an 9 as the first digit of a produce code and if a food is a GMO they will add a 8 as the first digit of the code.  So, to complete the banana example, if a sticker reads 94011, the banana is organic, if it reads 84011, the banana is Genetically Modified.

So easy you can't afford not to be a responsible consumer here!

For more on GMOs and "what's so bad about them anyway", read on.

GMO crops come from Genetically Modified seeds that have been 'bred' to be more hearty or be resistant to a specific type of herbicide. 

A major corporation called Monsanto is responsible for the production of many different agricultural and gardening products but the most infamous of all is Round-up.  Round-up is a herbicide that indiscriminately kills everything except for seeds that Monsanto also manufactures (and owns the rights for reproduction to) called 'Round-up Ready' seeds.  What's so bad about this? At first sniff it sounds pretty good to be able to grow a crop of corn or canola without having to worry about weeding... Yes until you understand that the Genetically Modified strain is dominant and when it breeds with natural strains of the same plant it turns the offspringing into a GMO. 

Corporations like Monsanto are responsible for wide-spread soil-erosion and destruction of biodiversity all over the world.  If you buy a GMO food at your local grocery store, chances are you're indirectly supporting Monsanto and other companies like them... You're saying "YES! This is what I want in my world!" every time you buy a GMO food whether or not you are aware of the implications.