General questions
Shall I move towards a greater variety of foods for improved nutrition, or greater restrictions on our food choices for improved ecological impact?
Shall I move towards fewer shopping trips to different places, or shall I move towards driving to more places (e.g. the grocery store, the co-op, the farmer’s market, the dairy drop-off, the grass farm)?
[ADDED] Shall I spend more time thinking and planning the family’s dietary choices, or shall I use that time for other useful and pleasurable activities?
Fats and oils
Shall I use more locally produced fats in cooking, i.e., more lard from the farm I get most of my dairy from, and more butter from PastureLand Farms of southeastern Minnesota? Or shall I use less animal-based fats, i.e. eat more long-distance imported olive, sesame, and coconut oils? Or shall I cook with less oil?
Dark Green Vegetables
Shall I serve them more often in the summer, in season, or shall we eat them daily year-round?
Shall I buy frozen turnip greens that were grown organically, or conventionally? Or should I not buy frozen greens?
Shall I buy greens to be eaten raw, or (presumably hardier and more local) cooking greens?
Shall I stop buying conventionally grown broccoli, with its reputation for pesticide absorption? Shall I, then, buy only organically grown broccoli, which means less fresh and more frozen?
Shall I use precious time gardening, not a hobby I enjoy for its own sake?
Protein
Shall I serve meat less often and high-carbohydrate protein meals like beans-and-rice more often? Or should I favor the lower-carbohydrate diet that has been the easiest way for me to keep my own weight down (I’m the only person in the family with that particular health problem)?
On Fridays, shall I serve more wild-caught fresh fish, which runs upwards of $20 per pound? Or shall we choose mostly eggs, cheese, and legumes, or canned fish? Shall I buy non-smoked canned tuna, or low-mercury tinned smoked kippers?
Shall I buy ordinary deli meats? Or shall I let my children eat mainly peanut butter on their lunchtime sandwiches? Or shall I buy expensive, humanely produced deli meat as a luxury that I serve far less often?
Shall I stick to our grass-fed beef and pork from the freezer or shall I buy the occasional kielbasa or bratwurst? Shall I ration the bacon and sausage from our half-hog, or shall I buy it at the grocery store after we run out with months to go before we get another hog? Or shall I make a trip to buy humanely raised bacon from the co-op?
Yellow Vegetables
Should I serve mostly sweet potatoes and squash in the winter, and carrots and yellow squash in the summer? Or should I rotate them throughout the year?
Should I buy woody organic carrots, or pleasantly crunchy conventional carrots? Or should I search far and wide for better organic carrots?
Fruits
Shall we eat mostly apples all winter long? (What else would be local and seasonal?) Or not? Shall we eat citrus fruit less often?
Shall we buy frozen fruit? Shall we buy imported fruit?
Shall we do the research to find out whether the organic apples were sprayed and how much? Shall we not bother and simply fill the fridge with fruit of all kinds, since the kids like it so much?
Starch
Shall we eat more of it, since it can give us the most nutritional calories (you know that’s really kcal right?) per kJ of petrochemical energy expended? Or shall we eat less of it, because it usually gives us far fewer vitamins and minerals per nutritional calorie than most fruits and vegetables do?
Is it feasible we eat more locally-produced starch? Here in Minnesota, what would that mean — more potatoes in the winter and more sweet corn in the summer? More wild rice, too, I suppose? Is cultivated "wild rice" a good substitute? Should we eat any long-distance starches at all?
Should we eat lots and lots of it in the form of wheat, since that packs the highest protein-and-fiber punch? Or should we favor more variety?
Sweet treats
Dark chocolate: an unmitigated boon or a global-capitalist child-labor horror story?
"Rapadura" and other less-refined cane sugars: a funny-tasting ripoff that’s not significantly better than white cane or beet sugar? (Cane’s a monoculture too after all.)
Grade B Dark maple syrup and molasses: worth the extra expense to substitute more often for white sugar, even where the distinctive flavor will be detectable? Or should I just use less sweetener overall and suit the sweetener to the recipe?
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