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Eating out in a restaurant is usually a time to relax and perhaps not a time you want to be thinking about being green. But simple decisions you make, like where to eat and what to order, can make a big difference.
A few years ago, choosing a green restaurant would have meant eating lentil bake in a bohemian vegetarian café while listening to sitar music. Today, however, fancy restaurants like London's Acorn House and Bristol's Bordeaux Quay are based on green foundations – following good eco practices such as recycling everything, and using only seasonal ingredients.
Many smaller, local restaurants do the same. The good news is that anything a restaurant does that is green is likely to be advertised on its menus or on boards outside, making it easier to choose an eco place to eat.
Whatever restaurant you decide on, the choices you make while ordering will still make a difference.
Seasonal produce
Firstly, get to know what is in season and order accordingly. If you see fresh strawberries on the menu in December, for example, they will have been flown in from far away, resulting in more emissions than strawberries picked locally in June.
If you can, order organic. The pesticides used in commercial farming cause a huge array of environmental problems, from polluting rivers, to causing health problems in farm workers in many parts of the developing world.
If you fancy fish, choose carefully. Hard as it is to imagine, the world's vast oceans are rapidly being emptied of fish in order to fill supermarket shelves and restaurant menus. The main problems are over-fishing in certain areas and fishing techniques such as bottom trawling.
Bottom trawlers drag enormous nets over the seabed catching things indiscriminately. Weighted with heavy metal rollers, the nets, some as wide as a football field, smash and crush everything in their path.
According to Greenpeace, if the same technique were used on land, it would be like dragging a vast net across the countryside – crushing trees, farms and wildlife in the process – in order to catch a few cows. Bottom trawling has already extinguished as many as 10,000 species, says Greenpeace.
The environmental group maintains a list of fish species threatened by unsustainable fishing, and it includes many favourites such as Atlantic Cod (except line-caught Icelandic), Tuna (all species except Skipjack tuna), Tropical prawns (farmed and wild) and Haddock (except line-caught Icelandic). So, before you order, ask how and where your fish was caught.
The environmental problems associated with eating too much meat have been well reported recently, so be green by considering the veggie option on the menu – it's not only for vegetarians.
Damaging methane
According to a UN study, farmed animals produce more greenhouse gas emissions (18%) than the world's entire transport system (13.5%). This may be hard to believe, but a single cow can produce 500 litres of methane a day through flatulence. Methane has 25 times the global warming impact of CO2 [source: www.sciencedaily.com], and there are 1.5 billion cows on the planet.
Then there are the 1.7 billion flatulent sheep to consider. Add to that all the land cleared for grazing, including huge tracts of the Amazon rainforest, and all the emissions generated through industrial feed production, the manufacture of fertilisers (to grow feed crops), and the transportation of both live animals and their carcasses across the globe, and you have one of the world's most environmentally damaging industries.
Water, water, everywhere
The latest restaurant goers' vice to get the attention of eco campaigners is bottled water. Various tests conducted by people such as the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation have found virtually no difference between bottled water and tap water. Yet in the UK we buy around two billion litres of bottled water a year [source: www.corporatewatch.org], carting it at great environmental expense from the other side of the world in plastic bottles that take hundreds of years to biodegrade.
So find somewhere that sells local, seasonal, organic produce, consider the veggie option, where possible ask for tap water, and enjoy your meal.
Related information:
Party guide – if you decide not to eat out and entertain at home instead, make sure you prepare your house and it's contents to protect from any damage.
Responsible travel – some ideas on reducing your holiday carbon footprint.
Green driving – if you're up to speed on how to be green in the house, why not check out our tips and advice on being a greener driver?
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