About Jay Weinstein A chef trained at the Culinary Institute of America, Jay Weinstein is a New York based food writer, editor, culinary instructor, and cookbook author. His food articles and recipes have been featured in The New York Times, Travel & Leisure, Newsday, Time Out New York, National Geographic Traveler, and numerous other publications. His latest book, The Ethical Gourmet, focuses on ecologically sustainable fine foods. He’s currently working on a book about sustainable use of water.

A Decision Tree Grows In Your Kitchen

I was underemployed at a dot-com startup when I learned the concept of a “decision tree,” where your first choice leads to your second, and so on. Liberated from that fluorescent-lit purgatory, I realized that the decision tree concept was the perfect way to decide what kinds of fruit and vegetables to buy. If you can’t find local, look for organic, for example.

We all want to protect the earth from pollution and defoliation. And we all want delicious fruits and vegetables. Fans of Asian vegetables like choy sum (flowering cabbage), gai lan (Chinese broccoli), dou miao (snow pea shoots), and dou jiao (long beans) will be glad to know that they’re almost all raised on smaller farms that practice more sustainable agriculture practices than factory farms do.

My decision tree for produce is four tiers:

1.) Local organic
2.) Local
3.) Organic
4.) Produced by ethical methods

Local Organic is the gold standard for choosing fresh vegetables, because it supports community agriculture, prevents transportation pollution, promotes good stewardship of the land, and eliminates toxins that are harmful to our waterways, fish populations, songbirds and other animals. Farmers markets and farm stands are the best places to find sources of locally-raised (within 50 miles of your home, or 150 if you live in a city), organic produce. You can find the nearest sources, no matter where you are in the country, by clicking on www.localharvest.org, and zeroing in on your home using their interactive map.

Local farms don’t have to truck their goods across countries and continents to get them to your table. It’s estimated that the average piece of food on the American dinner table has traveled 1500 miles to get there. In this age of petroleum overdependence and greenhouse-effect climate change, that’s way too far. Shame on the nay-sayers who argue that air-freighting 50,000 pounds of apples from New Zealand is a somehow more efficient than shipping 150 pounds 50 miles (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/science/29tier.html?_r=1&oref=slogin). Their long-haul theory only works if consumers shop right off the tarmac at the airport. Otherwise, their produce gets offloaded to trucks and trundled to market the same as the local stuff. Adding insult to injury, the shipped-in produce lacks the just-picked freshness and nutrition inherent in local produce. In areas with Asian populations, which exist in every state now, small farmers have adapted plantings to meet demands of those niche markets, and some of the best Asian vegetables show up at farmers markets.

Organic agriculture prohibits the use of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides. Instead, it relies on proven, age-old methods for fertilizing (such as rich compost and manure), and controls pests through natural methods (including use of beneficial insects like ladybugs, mantises, and micro-flora). Whenever it rains, fertilizer runoff from farms and suburban lawns ends up in creeks, streams and tributaries to our nation’s waterways. Downriver, it fuels algae blooms that deoxygenate coastal estuaries as they decay. This is suffocating young fish populations before they get a chance to reach the open ocean. It’s part of the huge decline in global fish populations. Pesticides, meanwhile, kill off huge swaths of beneficial and necessary insects, starving songbird populations (which have seen a 70% decline in the last 40 years), and poisoning the food chain that calls insects dinner. By choosing organic, whenever local is not available, you’ll be doing good somewhere, even if the organic farm is in New Zealand. I find that few Asian specialty vegetables are organically grown, but you can find some at health food stores and places like Whole Foods Market.

Producing by ethical means includes ensuring good stewardship of the land, even if it’s not organic or local. Fair Trade certified products like bananas, coffee, and chocolate products, are produced under inspection by officials of TransFair USA (http://www.transfairusa.org/), who ensure that the workers get paid a living wage, fields are not created by deforestation, and that minimum environmental measures are taken to protect the land. I’ve bought Fair Trade certified bananas for the exact same price as conventional bananas. All things being equal, why wouldn’t you? Do I ever buy plain old conventional carrots from wherever? Sure, when there’s no other choice. But in this country full of more choices than we know what to do with, having a decision tree helps me do the right thing as often as I can.