Boomer Opinion: Are We Too Old to Change How We Eat?

Are we eating right? As baby boomers, we have seen almost countless changes in what’s good and what’s bad in our diets. That’s what Ed Meek of Somerville, Massachusetts writes about in this Boomer Opinion piece in which he asks, Are we boomers too old to change what we eat?

“Always be closing,” says a character in playwright David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, but our “mantra” in America is “Always be dieting.”

Everyone I know is trying to lose a little weight. And wherever I go, I hear people talking about food. Now, what we eat has become a moral question due to our evolving understanding of the inner lives of animals and the role that what we eat plays in climate change. In addition, we are more aware that our eating habits, especially as we boomers get older, make it hard to stay healthy.

As British novelist Doris Lessing has written, anyone coming from another planet would be appalled at the way we consume sentient animals. Eventually, because of the burgeoning creation of meat substitutes, lots of us are going be moving beyond meat and eating “impossible burgers,” but in the meantime, there are other reasons to consider changing our diets.

Scientists estimate that the food we eat causes 21-37% of greenhouse gases, but when you combine the production of food with shipping and delivery, the effect on climate is even higher. According to David Wallace Wells, author of Uninhabitable Earth, “Some estimates are as high as one half when all aspects of food consumption… are considered.” So, if there is one area where we all ought to consider how we affect climate, it is in the food we eat.

In addition, in a recent article in The New York Times titled “Our Food Is Killing Too Many of Us,” authors Mozaffarian and Glickman argue that the most significant factor in healthcare is what we eat. Three out of four of us are overweight or obese and we eat too much meat, salt, and sugar, and not enough fresh fruit and vegetables.

Ironically, as journalist Wallace Wells points out, we are experiencing climate change in large part because through the selective crossbreeding of corn, wheat, and rice, Norman Borlaug (father of the Green Revolution in the 1960s) was able to help farmers double their harvests. On the one hand, this led to “staving off famines.” On the other hand, it engendered a quadrupling of the world’s population because there is plenty of food to eat. Unfortunately, all of those people use energy, buy goods, buy clothing, and eat animals.

When I was growing up Catholic in the 1950s, we ate fish once a week. Today, the average American eats more than four servings of beef a week! Couldn’t we start eating red meat just once a week? One of the great benefits of immigration is that we have many more choices of food than we had when we were growing up. Now we can enjoy hummus and stuffed grape leaves, pita bread, pad Thai, Indian curries.

In addition, to cut back on greenhouse gases produced by transporting food, why not buy food from local sources when we can? In the summer and fall, in New England, there are farmers markets with fresh berries, apples and peaches, tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce, bell peppers, carrots, beans, and radishes. We are also lucky in New England to still have a fishing industry with local haddock, oysters, scallops, and lobster. Changing our diet to emphasize fish and locally grown vegetables and fruit would be better for us and for the environment.

Ed Meek with his wife.

Of course, eating locally is not as easy as it sounds. We get our coffee from South America. We get shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico and Thailand. We get cod from Iceland, wild salmon from Alaska.

One way to grapple with this is to “reduce our consumption of red meat, poultry, seafood, eggs and dairy,” as they advise at Reducetarian.com. Reducetarian is a movement started by Brian Kateman who had been a Chick fil A addict. He wanted to lose weight, so he started trying to eat more vegetarian meals. He found support from people like food journalist Mark Bittman, who are vegetarian until dinner, and from vegans and vegetarians who occasionally eat fish or cheeseburgers.

We can’t wait for politicians and the corporations to solve the problem of climate change. In fact, if we make changes to our own lifestyle we can move the market (and our political representatives) in the right direction. A good place to start the green revolution is in changing what we eat.