I was just reading a post in an LCHF group and my overworked (yet underpaid) mind shot off on a tangent to this conundrum.
Yes, I am an LCHFer for life, but I am also a permaculturalist and I started wondering about the concept of Environmentally Sustainable LCHF?
By that I mean…. Incorporating an ethical environmental stance on the LCHF foods we eat. A generation or 2 ago, people ate based on the seasons. When different foods were in season, that is when they were consumed, and when they were over, that was it until the next year.
Now days, you can go into a supermarket and get all the fruit and veg you want, all year around. Think about the negative environmental impact involved in providing fruit and veggies all year around. Growing them in opposite parts of Australia where the climate suits and shipping them all across the country, or growing it in artificial conditions often using chemicals for ripening, importing them in at massive travel/fuel impact, or worse of all, relying upon genetically modified strains to unnaturally grow produce where and when it is not supposed to grow.
All my research and reading into the LCHF lifestyle talks about all the foods we can eat for all the healthy benefits that comes with eating Low Carb High Fat, but it seems to me that much of the suggested foods (veggies and safe fruits in particular) aren’t always available. For salads, things like Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Avocados etc are only in season part of the year. Many LCHFers talk about regularly consuming berries and nuts with their yoghurt, and while nuts can store well for a long time, berries are very seasonal. Veggies are seasonal too such as Zucchini, Broccoli, and even the LCHF Super-hero… Cauliflower.
Here are a range of questions that I’ve posed inside my head while writing this post.
- Should we continue to buy and consume produce that is not in season?
- More to the purpose of this post, CAN we continue to eat LCHF while still consuming only produce in season?
- Could we shop for produce ONLY at farmers markets and still manage to eat Low Carb/High Fat?
- What would we consume when the LCHF staples are not in season
I am not writing this post to provide an answer (as I don’t yet have an answer), but purely to pose a question, and maybe even encourage some people who might not have even given it a thought, to consider the impact their food shopping habits have on this precious rock we live on and rely on for life.
I will continue to put my grey matter to the test to try and come up with ways we can ease the burden on Gaia and maybe one day I will have a new model called LCHFEF (Low Carb High Fat Earth Friendly).