A Pocket Guide to Sustainable Food Shopping by Kate Bratskeir

A Pocket Guide to Sustainable Food Shopping

by Kate Bratskeir

Reduce your food and packaging waste and lower your carbon footprint with this modern, practical guide to sustainable grocery shopping.

Almond milk, oat milk, rice milk-which of the countless nondairy milks available on the market does the least harm to the environment? How do you decode the language on an egg carton? Is it possible to keep a bundle of fresh asparagus from spoiling so. darn. fast? If plastic is so bad, why is it on everything, and what can you do about it?

These are just some of the questions A Pocket Guide to Sustainable Food Shopping will help answer. Whether you're someone who's been making changes for years or you're clueless about where to start when it comes to sustainability, this book will teach you how to make a difference.

Cutting back on food waste is one of the most impactful ways you can personally help combat climate change. With extra pages for taking notes and a space to perform your own waste audit at home, this book provides the tools to make better choices about what goes into your grocery cart, and how you ultimately treat those items once they're in your home.

You'll learn some hard-to-swallow facts about the food industry and gain some actionable tips for making the grocery store-and the world-a more ethical place. You'll become better at reading food labels, getting acquainted with terms you can trust, and recognizing words and phrases to regard with skepticism. You'll gain the confidence to shop in the bulk section, ask your butcher questions about sourcing, and perhaps finally relieve some of the guilt you feel over the mountain of plastic bags accumulating beneath your sink.

If you're ready to make a change, let's get to it.

Reviewed by annieb123 on

5 of 5 stars

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Publishing to my blog at release: Nonstop Reader.

A Pocket Guide to Sustainable Food Shopping by Kate Bratskeir is an interesting, passionate, and accessible guide to minimizing our environmental footprint, consuming less, buying more wisely, and understanding the food delivery networks and marketing to avoid as much waste and packaging as possible. Due out 12th Jan 2021 from Simon & Schuster on their Tiller Press imprint, it's 144 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats.

This is a really well written guide full of tips and background info. The author is quite honest about the fact that an individual consumer's impact is negligible but that our collective influence is undeniable. The layout is logical and progresses from the general (problem categorization and beginning to make changes) to the specific (buying meat, eggs, milk, seafood, and navigating package free/bulk options). The book also includes template pages for note-taking and shopping lists, as well as an index.

Our current path especially in the west is a direct line to catastrophe. We simply cannot keep living like this and have a planet left for our children and grandchildren. It's literally unsustainable. This book provides some concrete methods of examining our own individual lifestyles and making changes in our personal consumption.

Five stars. There were some good tips here which I hadn't considered, and we tend to be fairly "green" already, but this book helped.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 18 September, 2020: Finished reading
  • 18 September, 2020: Reviewed