If You Love This Planet…

This is my bike. There are many like it but this one is mine. Without me, my bike us useless. Without my bike, I get lazy. Oh, and if you're wondering, this is a pedestrian and bicycle walkway slung between the east and west bound lanes of a freeway bridge across the river that bisects my town.

Lately I’ve been spending far more time outdoors, enjoying the waning summer. The fresh air and exercise is helping me to get back into shape, and when you get back to the human scale of living – jogging through parks, riding along trails, etc. it reminds you that our presence on this planet is more than moving from box to box in slightly smaller four-wheeled boxes.

There’s a whole living world out there beyond the concrete, in the gaps between road and sidewalk, and the larger gaps between cities. The problem is, we’re filling the gaps up and what we eat – or rather how we move food around before we eat it – is partly to blame.

Yesterday was the 200th birthday of the food can.

Yup, it’s only been about 200 years since we came up with prepackaged food. Well, there were jarred preserves before then, but they were either glass that let in UV light or clay containers that didn’t seal well. Then along came British inventor Peter Durand who presented his idea on August 25, 1810 (picture unavailable) to store preserved food in tinplate vessels.

Two centuries later there are more than 600 sizes and styles of cans being manufactured, according to something called the US Can Manufacturers Institute, which I imagine as having its offices in a large cylindrical building that’s very difficult to get into or out of. And a nice building at that, since the can manufacturing business is worth $14.9 billions each year.

Worldwide, we buy and eat more than 1,500 different food items from all over the globe at any given time of any given season. This requires people like those good folks at the USCMI to come up with new and innovative designs of molded and shaped cans, cans with multiple graphic capabilities, easy-open cans, and microwavable cans to not just preserve the food during shipping, but to make them visually appealing for us to buy.

When you consider we can’t actually see the food we’re buying until after we’ve taken it home and opened the can, getting us to pick X instead of Y is a testament to packaging.

Americans  alone recycle more than 1.5 million tonnes of steel cans, adding to the  roughly 74.5 million tonnes of steel recycled last year.

Mmmm... makes ya hungry, don'it?

Not only does what we eat impact our personal health in the short and long term, but the detritus impacts everyone around us. While on my starvation diet I ate a lot of Lean Cuisine and Weight Watchers meals (which were surprisingly okay to good – check the Reviews section) and was surprised not just by the high levels of sodium, but the amount of packaging involved.

Fortunately there are as many people working on this problem as there are people who like to pretend human activity has no impact on the environment. A few enterprising companies have even developed some neat tricks to turn plastic back into oil, reducing the amount of yogurt containers ending up in landfill, while at the same time decreasing the number of new holes we have to poke into the Earth to extract its black gooey goodness and burn it up so we can get to and from the grocery store without walking or pedaling.

The plastic to oil processes are a bit beyond the topic theme of this blog, so I’ll leave that between you and Google. But think about this; just as the food you buy based on its nutrition can influence the kind of food producers make, thereby (hopefully) influencing them to make more healthy foods, the packages you choose to buy can influence the packages they put those healthy foods in.

If you notice that getting at certain foods is like opening a men’s disposable razor (open package, remove contents, tear plastic off contents, remove product inside tray that was covered in plastic inside box…) you might want to mention it to your grocery store manager. Cutting down on packaging means less landfill, which means less pollution, which means healthier us.

It’s worth a mention, don’t you think?