Green Juice and Green Anxiety

by Laura Wright  |  January 10, 2008  |  More By Laura Wright

I’m one of those strange people who drink green juice. For the past few months I’ve been drinking it for breakfast: spinach, parsley, celery, apples, and lemon on a typical day. Usually I buy it; a guy named Melvin makes it at the LifeThyme Natural Market on Sixth Avenue, which I pass on my walk to work. His juice comes out better than mine. I never get the proportions right. For example, this morning I made my own and I put too much lemon in, tried to correct it by adding extra pear, but it didn’t work. So the juice I’m drinking as I type this is a little on the tart side today.

It’s like having a giant salad, liquefied, of course, so I’m doing a good thing for my health, and for the health of the earth. As far as my health goes, sticking to a diet high in fruits and vegetables and low in processed foods is one of the best things I can do for myself. I drink this green juice for breakfast and then I actually eat a salad for lunch, with avocado or walnuts or something in there to add some protein and fat to the mix. So for most of the day I’m a vegan, though I can’t call myself one: I go back to being a flesh-eating omnivore after the sun sets.

As I walked to work this morning, I tried to think through what my decision to eat and drink vegan for so much of the day meant in terms of my environmental footprint. I hadn’t thought it out before, but I thought figuring it out might provide me with some added motivation when I’m grumpy, tired, and would prefer to eat a platter of proscuitto and cheese to a plate of rabbit food.

My first thoughts were simple: I’m not eating mass produced cereal made from corn and grain that required boatloads of pesticides, which is then doused in milk from cows that were pumped full of antibiotics and growth hormones. Yes, I could buy organic versions of those products. But eating greens produced organically on local farms trumps grains and dairy, which require more resources to grow, harvest, and so on. But then I started wondering about the hothouses my veggies must have been grown in. It’s January in New York—my lemons are not growing naturally on a local farm. Trying to actually calculate where your eating habits fall on a scale of environmental saintliness is anxiety inducing—it seems impossibly complicated. (Taking this too far might spark a novel type of eating disorder. I wonder if anyone has considered that yet? Surely there are some real obsessives out there who freak when they don't know where their rutebaga came from...)

Throughout the course of the morning I’ve remembered a couple of things that have put me at ease a bit:

1. I remember that the best option is probably just to buy whatever is fresh and available at the farmer’s market and put that in my juice when I make it on my own. I can figure out where the farmer’s markets are on localharvest.org, and I can figure out what’s in season right now using this new NRDC website, www.nrdc.org/health/foodmiles/.

2. I had these thoughts while I was walking to work (not driving, and yes, I realize I’m lucky that I can do this), with the vegetable scraps tied up in a bag so I could put them in the compost bin at the office, thus reducing the amount of food waste that goes into landfill, where it decomposes and releases methane—a potent greenhouse gas—into the atmosphere. This was the first time I've done this, and I admittedly felt like a freak carrying a bag filled with what looks like veggie vomit inside my fancy handbag. That said, I must go. I just remembered the vegetable mush is still in my bag.