How Can We Make More Sustainable Food Choices? Read The Blue Plate

Once in a great while, a book is published that refuses to allow me to look at the world in the same way I did before reading it. I challenge you to read Mark Easter’s new book, The Blue Plate and look at the world in the same way you do today.

Easter is a professional ecologist and leverages his experience in carbon accounting and profound understanding of nature’s interconnectedness to explain the ecological impact of each ingredient served at a nice dinner.

The Blue Plate is at once lyrical—describing natural worlds with phenomenal narrative beauty—and exquisitely well-researched—cross-referencing surprising nuggets of information with recent peer-reviewed research papers. This masterful combination of art and science draws the reader into Easter’s narrative and leaves one with a much better grounding of the complex and beautiful ecological processes that allow us to live on this tiny blue marble floating in space. Its flowing prose and scientific rigor elevate it to a level with classic books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Robin Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass.

I spend a lot of time reading about the science of climate change and the effects of our agricultural system on the planet’s carbon imbalance and talking to farmers and ranchers. With this background, I had a sense of what I would find in Easter’s book before reading it, but my intuition was wrong—my copy of the book is swollen with sticky notes marking passages that particularly surprised me.

For example, everyone knows that salmon mature in the ocean then swim upstream to spawn. Read Easter’s description of his epiphany after catching and releasing a salmon headed for spawning grounds:

This observation that the Pacific Northwest’s beautiful evergreen forests were built on a foundation of ocean nutrients carried within the very flesh of the salmon hit me like a diamond bullet. I defy you to ever look at the salmon on your plate in the same way after considering this idea for even a moment.

After reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I ceased buying anything at fast food hamburger joints (much to my then-young children’s dismay). Similarly, after reading Easter’s book, shrimp cocktails are forever a culinary memory, to be replaced by oysters, for as long as the rising temperatures and acidity of the oceans allow them to be farmed.

Easter points out that virtually all shrimp we eat comes from coastal areas in Southeast Asia where mangrove forests (which surprisingly store as much carbon per acre as Giant Redwood forests) are cleared to make way for shrimp farms. For this reason, one pound of shrimp contains nearly twice the embedded carbon of pork—no carbon lightweight itself. In contrast, oysters sequester carbon in the process of constructing their shells; the carbon footprint of a pound of oysters is an outstanding 97% lower than that of shrimp.

I found that the take-aways from Easter’s book fit well with Pollan’s rules for eating (eat food—not chemically engineered food substitutes, not too much, mostly plants). The great advantage of Easter’s book is that his background as a scientist allows him to provide readers with one rule missing from Pollan’s list: Understand where your food comes from.

On this point, Easter’s engaging yet thorough explanations of how humans alter ecosystems to create food supply chains are of inestimable value. I now understand so much more clearly, for example, the consequences of damming a river for hydropower and irrigation and why ruminants’ carbon footprints are so disproportionately high compared to pigs or chickens.

Speaking with Easter, his gentility and compassion, both for the natural places he loves and for his fellow people, shine through. His book is not written to shame us for our culinary choices. He lays out our habits and their cost to the environment, using data not as a cudgel, but as a magnifying glass.

“We have to give each other grace because we are so separated from how food gets produced in much of the developed world,” he explained to me.

The production quality of Easter’s book is a treasure. Patagonia—a company I knew for good clothing and environmental stewardship but not publishing—did a lovely job illustrating The Blue Plate with arresting and memorable displays of quantitative data and beautiful photographs.

The Blue Plate is brilliant. If you eat, you should read it. Though Easter writes gracefully and gently, no reader will be able to unsee the picture his narrative so clearly paints: the choices each of us makes three times a day have an impact on our world.