How to eat for a better Earth
How to eat for a better Earth. Although good nutrition is essential for human life, food production has a significant impact on the environment. Taking a more sustainable approach to sustaining your body can help protect the Earth and its climate. (Family Features)
Food production accounts for more than one-fourth of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report compiled by “Our World in Data.” Learn how you can fill your plate with more earth-friendly foods by practicing these sustainable habits:
Grow Your Own Food
Gardening offers many benefits beyond the bounty of your harvest. Spending time outdoors in the sunshine is good for the soul while the foods you raise provide a convenient source of nutrition. Picking fresh produce from your backyard means you’re bypassing transportation, packaging and many of the other aspects of food production that are detrimental to the environment. What’s more, you get to enjoy the satisfaction of knowing you’re personally responsible for the food on your plate.
Reduce Food Waste
An estimated 30-40% of the United States’ food supply goes to waste each year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Not only could this food be helping hungry people, it’s taking up valuable space. USDA data shows food waste is the single largest category of material in U.S. landfills.
There are numerous easy ways you can do your part to ensure food is being used wisely. Be sure food is stored properly to prevent it from going bad before you eat it. At the grocery store, select “ugly” foods that may be misshapen or look unusual but are still fully edible. Plan your meals so you use ingredients (across multiple meals, if necessary) and either avoid leftovers or repurpose them into another meal. Avoid overeating, which has a negative impact on your health, wastes food resources and increases environmental impacts from processing and transportation.
Buy Climate-Friendly Foods
Choosing snacks that share your commitment to the climate can make a big difference. Not only does it help you feel better about the foods you eat, supporting brands that make the environment a priority can raise the bar for others. One example is Airly crackers, which are made with 100% wholesome oats and grains, and grown through a farming process that removes carbon dioxide from the air. The company also invests in agricultural and forestry projects by purchasing carbon credits to offset its production and transportation footprint.
The carbon footprint is on the back of each box, so you can see how many grams of carbon dioxide you are helping to remove from the air while satisfying a snack craving. Look for four flavor varieties packed with sweet and savory notes including cheddar, sea salt, chocolate and salted caramel.
Shop in Season
Eating fresh produce that’s in season isn’t just delicious; it’s better for the Earth. Typically, extensive resources are required to make foods available out of season, such as transportation to transfer food from a more productive growing climate or energy resources to create artificial growing conditions in heated greenhouses. Alternatives include buying extra foods while they’re in season and preserving them or using minimally processed alternatives like frozen or canned foods.
Be Conscious of Processing and Packaging
In general, foods with more packaging have a bigger impact on the environment. While some degree of packaging is necessary to safely preserve and transport food, choosing options with minimal recyclable packaging is a step you can take to help reduce how the food you eat affects the Earth.
Know Where it Comes From
Locally produced foods travel a shorter distance, which means they require less handling and transportation. That’s good news for the environment and it’s a simple way to support your community, too. Knowing more about the sources of your food goes beyond eating local. You can also make purchases from brands that promote sustainable agriculture and take meaningful steps to protect the environment, animals and natural habitats.
Learn more about foods that make a difference at airlyfoods.com.
It’s Not Just What You Eat
When it comes to food and sustainability, what you eat is only part of the equation. How you go about getting your food also affects the total impact of your food consumption on the environment.
Transportation: When most people think about the cost of transportation on the climate, they’re thinking about food production. However, your own transportation to and from the store adds up, too. Plan your shopping trips responsibly so you’re making as few trips as possible.
Shopping bags: They may be recyclable, but the Environmental Protection Agency estimates only about 10% of plastic bags actually get recycled. The majority of the rest end up in landfills. Consider using paper or investing in sturdy reusable bags instead.
Bulk purchases: Buying in bulk may help save money, but it’s also a way to cut down on frequent shopping trips and significantly reduce the packaging that results from smaller, individually wrapped items.
Photos courtesy of Getty Images
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Why vacations feel like they’re over before they even startPeople tend to reflexively assume that fun events will go by really quickly.
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Selin Malkoc, The Ohio State University
Why vacations feel like they’re over before they even start. For many people, summer vacation can’t come soon enough – especially for the half of Americans who canceled their summer plans last year due to the pandemic.
But when a vacation approaches, do you ever get the feeling that it’s almost over before it starts?
If so, you’re not alone.
In some recent studies Gabriela Tonietto, Sam Maglio, Eric VanEpps and I conducted, we found that about half of the people we surveyed indicated that their upcoming weekend trip felt like it would end as soon as it started.
This feeling can have a ripple effect. It can change the way trips are planned – you might, for example, be less likely to schedule extra activities. At the same time, you might be more likely to splurge on an expensive dinner because you want to make the best of the little time you think you have.
Where does this tendency come from? And can it be avoided?
Not all events are created equal
When people look forward to something, they usually want it to happen as soon as possible and last as long as possible.
We first explored the effect of this attitude in the context of Thanksgiving.
We chose Thanksgiving because almost everyone in the U.S. celebrates it, but not everyone looks forward to it. Some people love the annual family get-together. Others – whether it’s the stress of cooking, the tedium of cleaning or the anxiety of dealing with family drama – dread it.
So on the Monday before Thanksgiving in 2019, we surveyed 510 people online and asked them to tell us whether they were looking forward to the holiday. Then we asked them how far away it seemed, and how long they felt it would last. We had them move a 100-point slider – 0 meaning very short and 100 meaning very long – to a location that reflected their feelings.
As we suspected, the more participants looked forward to their Thanksgiving festivities, the farther away it seemed and shorter it felt. Ironically, longing for something seems to shrink its duration in the mind’s eye.
Winding the mind’s clock
Most people believe the idiom “time flies when you’re having fun,” and research has, indeed, shown that when time seems to pass by quickly, people assume the task must have been engaging and enjoyable.
We reasoned that people might be over-applying their assumption about the relationship between time and fun when judging the duration of events yet to happen.
As a result, people tend to reflexively assume that fun events – like vacations – will go by really quickly. Meanwhile, pining for something can make the time leading up to the event seem to drag. The combination of its beginning pushed farther away in their minds – with its end pulled closer – resulted in our participants’ anticipating that something they looked forward would feel as if it had almost no duration at all.
Why vacations feel like they’re over before they even startVacations are fleeting.
LSaloni/Getty Images
In another study, we asked participants to imagine going on a weekend trip that they either expected to be fun or terrible. We then asked them how far away the start and end of this trip felt like using a similar 0 to 100 scale. 46% of participants evaluated the positive weekend as feeling like it had no duration at all: They marked the beginning and the end of the vacation virtually at the same location when using the slider scale.
Thinking in hours and days
Our goal was to show how these two judgments of an event – the fact that it simultaneously seems farther away and is assumed to last for less time – can nearly eliminate the event’s duration in the mind’s eye.
We reasoned that if we didn’t explicitly highlight these two separate pieces – and instead directly asked them about the duration of the event – a smaller portion of people would indicate virtually no duration for something they looked forward to.
We tested this theory in another study, in which we told participants that they would watch two five-minute-long videos back-to-back. We described the second video as either humorous or boring, and then asked them how long they thought each video would feel like it lasted.
We found that the participants predicted that the funny video would still feel shorter and was farther away than the boring one. But we also found that participants believed it would last a bit longer than the responses we received in the earlier studies.
This finding gives us a way to overcome this biased perception: focus on the actual duration. Because in this study, participants directly reported how long the funny video would last – and not the perceived distance of its beginning and its end – they were far less likely to assume it would be over just as it started.
While it sounds trivial and obvious, we often rely on our subjective feelings – not objective measures of time – when deciding how long a period of time will feel and how to best use it.
So when looking forward to much-anticipated events like vacations, it’s important to remind yourself just how many days it will last.
You’ll get more out of the experience – and, hopefully, put yourself in a better position to take advantage of the time you do have.
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Selin Malkoc, Associate Professor of Marketing, The Ohio State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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It’s not just bad behavior – why social media design makes it hard to have constructive disagreements online
Technology can trip people up on the road to finding common ground.
Johanna Svennberg/iStock via Getty Images
Amanda Baughan, University of Washington
Good-faith disagreements are a normal part of society and building strong relationships. Yet it’s difficult to engage in good-faith disagreements on the internet, and people reach less common ground online compared with face-to-face disagreements.
There’s no shortage of research about the psychology of arguing online, from text versus voice to how anyone can become a troll and advice about how to argue well. But there’s another factor that’s often overlooked: the design of social media itself.
My colleagues and I investigated how the design of social media affects online disagreements and how to design for constructive arguments. We surveyed and interviewed 257 people about their experiences with online arguments and how design could help. We asked which features of 10 different social media platforms made it easy or difficult to engage in online arguments, and why. (Full disclosure: I receive research funding from Facebook.)
We found that people often avoid discussing challenging topics online for fear of harming their relationships, and when it comes to disagreements, not all social media are the same. People can spend a lot of time on a social media site and not engage in arguments (e.g. YouTube) or find it nearly impossible to avoid arguments on certain platforms (e.g. Facebook and WhatsApp).
Here’s what people told us about their experiences with Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube, which were the most and least common places for online arguments.
Facebook
Seventy percent of our participants had engaged in a Facebook argument, and many spoke negatively of the experience. People said they felt it was hard to be vulnerable because they had an audience: the rest of their Facebook friends. One participant said, on Facebook, “Sometimes you don’t admit your failures because other people are looking.” Disagreements became sparring matches with a captive audience, rather than two or more people trying to express their views and find common ground.
People also said that the way Facebook structures commenting prevents meaningful engagement because many comments are automatically hidden and cut shorter. This prevents people from seeing content and participating in the discussion at all.
WhatsApp
In contrast, people said arguing on a private messaging platform such as WhatsApp allowed them “to be honest and have an honest conversation.” It was a popular place for online arguments, with 76% of our participants saying that they had argued on the platform.
The organization of messages also allowed people to “keep the focus on the discussion at hand.” And, unlike the experience with face-to-face conversations, someone receiving a message on WhatsApp could choose when to respond. People said that this helped online dialogue because they had more time to think out their responses and take a step back from the emotional charge of the situation. However, sometimes this turned into too much time between messages, and people said they felt that they were being ignored.
Overall, our participants felt the privacy they had on WhatsApp was necessary for vulnerability and authenticity online, with significantly more people agreeing that they could talk about controversial topics on private platforms as opposed to public ones like Facebook.
YouTube
Very few people reported engaging in arguments on YouTube, and their opinions of YouTube depended on which feature they used. When commenting, people said they “may write something controversial and nobody will reply to it,” which makes the site “feel more like leaving a review than having a conversation.” Users felt they could have disagreements in the live chat of a video, with the caveat that the channel didn’t moderate the discussion.
Unlike Facebook and WhatsApp, YouTube is centered around video content. Users liked “the fact that one particular video can be focused on, without having to defend, a whole issue,” and that “you can make long videos to really explain yourself.” They also liked that videos facilitate more social cues than is possible in most online interactions, since “you can see the person’s facial expressions on the videos they produce.”
YouTube’s platform-wide moderation had mixed reviews, as some people felt they could “comment freely without persecution” and others said videos were removed at YouTube’s discretion “usually [for] a ridiculous or nonsensical reason.” People also felt that when creators moderated their comments and “just filter things they don’t like,” it hindered people’s ability to have difficult discussions.
Redesigning social media for better arguing
We asked participants how proposed design interactions could improve their experiences arguing online. We showed them storyboards of features that could be added to social media. We found that people like some features that are already present in social media, like the ability to delete inflammatory content, block users who derail conversations and use emoji to convey emotions in text.
People were also enthusiastic about an intervention that helps users to “channel switch” from a public to private online space. This involves an app intervening in an argument on a public post and suggesting users move to a private chat. One person said “this way, people don’t get annoyed and included in online discussion that doesn’t really involve them.” Another said, “this would save a lot of people embarrassment from arguing in public.”
One way social media platforms can intervene: move squabbles out of public discussions.
‘Someone Is Wrong on the Internet: Having Hard Conversations in Online Spaces’, CC BY-ND
Intervene, but carefully
Overall, the people we interviewed were cautiously optimistic about the potential for design to improve the tone of online arguments. They were hopeful that design could help them find more common ground with others online.
Yet, people are also wary of technology’s potential to become intrusive during an already sensitive interpersonal exchange. For instance, a well-intentioned but naïve intervention could backfire and come across as “creepy” and “too much.” One of our interventions involved a forced 30-second timeout, designed to give people time to cool off before responding. However, our subjects thought it could end up frustrating people further and derail the conversation.
Social media developers can take steps to foster constructive disagreements online through design. But our findings suggest that they also will need to consider how their interventions might backfire, intrude or otherwise have unintended consequences for their users.
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Amanda Baughan, PhD Student in Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
How to eat for a better Earth
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