Published by Paula Baker-Laporte under Green Living

Second in a series of columns titled The Healthy Home Corner.

Last column I spoke of Building Biology and the direct correlation between a home’s ability to nurture health (biological compatibility) and its ecological performance. Throughout most of human history, craftsmen have built enduring, climatically responsive shelters with the materials at hand. In an abrupt departure from all that preceded, we now “assemble” homes with mass-produced industrialized building products, at great cost to our bodily health and that of our environment.

This health/ecology inter-relationship may be understood by examining many facets of modern American life. This is relevant not only to what we build, but also to what we eat and wear, how we travel, how we treat illness, etc. The production and consumption of food aptly illustrates this inter-connectedness.

I have been a health food enthusiast since the early days when tiny health stores stocked gigantic vats of rancid peanut butter. However, I never really thought much about the connection between food and ecology until a visit to Canada a few years ago. At that time, their government had issued the “One Tonne Challenge” to its citizens, urging each Canadian to reduce carbon emissions by one metric ton per year. A pamphlet offered constructive suggestions as to how one might achieve this goal. I was surprised to learn that one effective strategy was to buy locally grown organic food.

What I didn’t grow myself, I’ve always enjoyed buying at the local farmers market — because it is friendly, organic and fresh, and thus delicious and nutritious. I never realized the extent to which I was participating in good ecological citizenship until I began to follow the story of food production. Several excellent books, among them Harvest of Hope, by Jane Goodall, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollen, helped me to understand the farm-to-table story.

Until very recently, much of the human species fed itself with a well-rounded, nutritionally complete diet of locally grown and seasonally available foods. Over the last 60 years or so our diet has been revolutionized by industrialized farming, which promised cheap nutrition, variety and food security. But though it offers us, the most privileged of the planet, once undreamed-of convenience, industrially farmed food is neither optimally nutritious nor ecologically sustainable.

The standard American diet now comes from huge monoculture factory farms where genetically modified seed stock is grown in sterilized soils, fertilized with petrochemical-based fertilizers, doused with pesticides, transported great distances and “value enhanced” with questionable food extracts and a variety of chemical additives. It arrives at our supermarket in seductive but wasteful packaging.

Jane Goodall tells us that our food travels on average 2,000 miles from field to fork, and bears an environmentally devastating cost of, on average, ten calories of energy expended for every calorie of food value on the typical American dinner plate.

The art of meeting our nutritional needs locally and sustainably has been all but lost in our rush towards the industrialization and mass production of food. It may be doubtful that most of us can still feed ourselves through a network of small farms, but I do know that every time I forgo the megamarket’s fancy packaging, or compost, or buy locally or grow my own organic garden and then prepare simple and wholesome meals from scratch, I am constructing a win-win situation. By doing this I am casting a vote for a sustainable future for myself and for the planet.

Paula Baker-Laporte FAIA (paula@econest.com) is an architect and a certified building biology practitioner. She is the principle of Baker-Laporte and Associates and EcoNest Design. She is primary author of “Prescriptions for a Healthy House” and co-author with husband Robert Laporte of “Econest-Creating Sustainable Sanctuaries of Clay, Straw and Timber”

(Reprinted courtesy of Santa Fe Real Estate Guide.)