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Designing an Ecological Diet
There's a lot of talk about ecological design lately. If you look to the periphery of techonological innovation you will see more and more waste being designed OUT of products. Forward thinking designers know that waste is inherently ineffective. In natural systems, when something that is created passes it useful life, the components of that something can be made into something else. For example, when the leaves fall off an apple tree, they fall to the ground, decompose, and eventually become an apple. When you eat the apple, what was once a leaf becomes you.
GreenBlue, a new non-profit organization, makes it their mission to design, create, and promote economies that:
- Purifies air, water, and soil
- Retains valuable materials for perpetual, productive reuse
- Requires no regulation
- Celebrates an abundance of cultural and biological diversity
- Enhances nature's capacity to thrive
- Grows health, wealth, and useful resources
- Generates value and opportunity for all.
What an astounding economic design concept! It's Nature delivered to your door. Economies should begin from within each individual. It is our needs and wants that shape what is bought and sold. How each of us live determines how humanity progresses or digresses. As we grow from our dietary choices, there is one diet that can sustain the economy that GreenBlue and ecologically-minded individuals imagine: whole, ripe, fresh, organic fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds.
T.C. Fry wrote, "We could make the whole world a Garden of Eden, a veritable paradise, if we could overcome human perversions and misconceptions and correctly orient our fellow humans. Fruit, vegetable, and nut culture adds to the soil whereas cereal culture and animal husbandry deplete it. Not only do our current practices ruin our health; not only do they ruin our soils and environment, but they give us only a fraction of the values we could get from the correct diet." Let's take a brief look at the production of fruits, grains, and meat and see how they compare:
| Concept | Meat | Grain | Fruit |
| Purifies air, water, and soil | Meat production is one of the leading causes of greenhouse gas pollution and agricultural runoff. | Largely a monoculture based production, which result in topsoil losses. | Fruit trees send roots deep in the soil and bring nutrients to the surface. They have a large surface area to convert CO2 to oxygen. |
| Retains valuable materials for perpetual, productive reuse | Once a cow is killed, it can't produce anymore | The yearly harvest results in heavy soil nutrient losses | One fruit tree produces thousands of seeds and thousands of potential new fruit trees |
| Requires no regulation | In 1998, the USDA spent $712 million on meat and poultry safety | $253 million was spent by the FDA on safety for all other foods | Theoritically, people can grow their own fruit |
| Celebrates an abundance of cultural and biological diversity | "Beef. It's what's for dinner?" | Monoculture: how many varieties of wheat have you ever tried? | There are hundreds of varieties of every species of fruit; the ones you find in the supermarket represent probably less than 1% of the fruit of the world |
| Enhances nature's capacity to thrive | Denatured proteins, toxic fats, and other deleterious substances in meat shorten lifespan and diminish quality of life | Opiates, undigestible fiber, and complex carbohydrates create a sluggish digestive system | A diet high in fruit promotes health and well-being |
| Grows health, wealth, and useful resources | Saturated fats from meat are known to cause heart disease | Cereal farming requires extensive fossil fuel powered farming equipment | Fruit culture generates the most cash value per acre |
| Generates value and opportunity for all | one acre of pasture yields 150lbs of beef on average, and I estimate a retail value of $150-250 | one acre of wheat yields 1,200lbs on average, and I estimate a retail value of $1200 or less | one acre of bananas yield 30,000lbs of fruit on average, and I estimate a retail value of $15,000 or more |
The more fruits we include as part of our athletic nutrition and the more ecologically sound our living, the further we can take our performance potential.
