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• Social impact: Support local industry, and consider buying ‘fair trade.’

• Health impact: How the food was grown and processed will have an impact on your health. Minimise
the amount of processed foods that are generally high in fats and/or sugars. Eat a wide variety of
whole foods, including vegetables of as many colours as possible (green, yellow, red, orange).

• Financial impact: Some good food will cost more but there are ways to minimise this: buying in bulk,
buying unprocessed food, and growing your own food all save money. Meat produced sustainably
generally costs more, so eat less so that you can afford good quality sustainable meat.

Tier 2: Middle o’ the Road (Intermediate level)

Cut down on meat

This might sound hard but it’s actually easier than it looks. Especially if you take an incremental approach.

• If you’re just getting started with reducing your meat consumption and aren’t sure about it, you could
start with an initiative like ‘Meat Free Monday’, which aims to get people to eat no meat one day a week.

• If you feel like you must eat meat, then you want to be eating very little (a maximum of 90 grams a day
- that’s the same weight as six 50 cent pieces - i.e. not very much!) to stay in line with the World Health
Organisation’s recommended daily intake. When you do eat meat, know where your meat comes from and
choose sustainable sources such as free range poultry, grass-fed beef, Certified Sustainable Seafood by
the Marine Stewardship Council and kangaroo

If you can’t cook - learn!

• Take a course on how to use garden produce, or how to cook from scratch

• The Canberra Environment Centre and some of the local farmers’ markets have great cooking courses
you can sign up for.

Learn how to preserve food

• Take a Total Environment Centre course to learn how to make delicious jams and chutneys.

• You can also borrow a dehydrator from a friend (camping enthusiasts will probably own one) and dehydrate
leftover fruit to make tasty snacks.

• For recipes that make best use of your food scraps, check out this article from Australian Ethical and
another from the Huffington Post.

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