Healthy Living by Lori

SWEDEN is to become the first country to promote “climate-friendly” food labels. Consumers who want to buy food products that are ‘good for our earth’, now have a system to help them do so. Or do they really?  Ironically, the first product to tout the label is a small milk producer located just north of Stockhol. This milk has gone ‘green’ by  switching from chemical-based fertilizers to manure. Does it say anywhere on the label that milk is one of the more energy resource foods to begin with? Of course not. This type of ‘helpful’ food labeling has been done before and can be a double edged sword. For example, companies promote their product to be ‘free of saturated fats’, when in fact there were never any saturated fats in the products to begin with AND they are loaded with copious amounts of extra sugar.  The point is -  consumers should not just ‘trust’ the label.  Labels often miss the whole story of the product.  Switching from chemical based fertilizers to manure, sounds great, and it is a good start.  If the consumer is not aware that meat and dairy are extremely energy consuming food products as is, then we are still going in circles.

So…would I buy the less energy intense milk? Yep. However, I have already cut my milk and meat consumption to 1/4 of what it use to be. Reducing overall consumption is what really needs to be at the top of the ‘to do’ list!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 10:18 AM and is filed under Good for You, Good for the Earth News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.