Recently, I’ve been repeatedly faced with the reality that eating sustainably is “no longer about what you eat, but how you eat.” This means that, while our society continues to operate within a system of capitalism, veganism may not necessarily be the optimal—or only—solution to reducing our individual carbon footprints. So long as exploitative labour and industrial practices that treat nature as a commodity persist, our natural resources will continue to be depleted to the point of no return.
As someone who actively promotes veganism as the most effective method to curbing our emissions, this was a hard truth to swallow. But while it’s clear that the conversation can no longer be limited to veganism or vegetarianism, this doesn’t mean we should start mindlessly eating meat again. A plant-based diet clearly still makes a massive difference in terms of climate change, but we just need to extend this conversation past the simple decision of what types of food we should and should not eat, to the way our food is cultivated, sourced, and consumed. Moreover, this conversation must include the topic of what we do after we eat—and with the food that fails to make it to our bodies.
Firstly, let’s talk about is food miles. As Michael Pollan writes in his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, “the typical item of food on an American’s plate travels some fifteen hundred miles to get there, and is frequently better traveled and more worldly than its eater.” An abundance of greenhouse gas emissions is often incurred through imports from foreign countries, as the packaging and transportation requires a ton of resources. In order to ship produce into Hong Kong from Australia, over 100,000 litres of jet fuel is required. And from Chile, that number goes up to over 270, 000 litres. By eating food that’s grown and harvested where we live, we can reduce carbon emissions while supporting local farmers. Furthermore, from a health standpoint, eating locally produced food is also much more nutritious, as imported products are harvested before ripening and lose important vitamins and minerals during travel time.
Map of Food Imports into Hong Kong
However, in Hong Kong, eating locally may not be the most accessible option. According to this article, we rely heavily on imports for over 90% of the food we consume, and 5.26% of the city’s GDP is spent on purchasing food that the city consumes every day. The largest provider of the city’s fresh food needs is Mainland China, where food safety issues, lack of hygiene standard enforcement and harmful food additives run rampant—affecting both the food we eat and the soil in which it’s cultivated. Hong Kong’s lack of food security in turn directs us towards other countries as a source for healthy, affordable food—including chilled and frozen meat from Brazil, Australia, the U.S. and New Zealand, and fresh fruit, vegetables, live and frozen seafood from Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and Norway. However, with differing food safety standards, the widespread use of chemicals to preserve produce and inefficiencies in the food chains, much of this food ends up incinerated or in landfills—which then proceeds to emit detrimental quantities of methane into our atmosphere, leading to further environmental degradation.
So what can we do?
Support local farmers markets in Hong Kong—and be sure to bring your own containers/bags when you visit! If this is not possible/accessible to you, you can try to support local farm-to-table restaurants when eating out. Some of my favourites are Treehouse Eco, Fresca, and MANA!. These may cost more than your average meal at places like Tsui Wah, but if it’s something you can afford financially, it’s a great short-term trade you can make in exchange for long-term benefits to the environment—and your health. However, while locally grown produce reduces food miles, this doesn’t always always translate into other farming practices that are good for the Earth. The best part about these face-to-face interactions is that you can often speak to the producers of your food. Find out if they employ good soil practices—healthy soil that captures carbon can offer increased yields, resilience to climate instability, and higher health and vitality for farming and ranching communities—such as composting, not using synthetic inputs (as these chemicals can destroy soil life while contaminating the food we eat and water we drink), crop rotation (to ensure fields don’t become nutrient deficient in one nutrient or another), and whether or not they treat their workers fairly—as opposed to exploiting cheap labour.
If you conclude that there is nothing grown locally from farmers who are maintaining healthy soil, purchase from companies that are transparent with their sourcing and are investing in good soil health. A great way to identify food that is produced responsibly is by utilizing third-party certification labels such as USDA Organic,
Order produce from subscription boxes that partner with local farms in the region. This will cost more than usual produce from the supermarket, but the food you receive will be local and organic, which is not only fresher but also essential in maintaining a stable ecosystem. Be sure to ask if they come in plastic-free packaging as well! Two well known delivery services include the ones below:
They partner with local family farms to harvest crops at their optimal ripeness, provide annual audits to ensure farmers are using natural methods that encourage sustainability by improving the local environment, source from multiple local farms to provide more variety and stability to customers, while encouraging local farmers to farm naturally, and aim to foster a relationship between local producers and local consumers.
Following the belief that eating locally means adapting to the climate and the weather in which the food grows, they offer food that helps customers sync with the natural cycle of the planet and teaches us how to respect the cycle of life. They also do this by encouraging customers to eat eating seasonal food, which is another way to lower your dietary footprint.
This vegetable garden calendar is a great resource which indicates the types of produce that are seasonally available during different times of the year.
Homegrown Cherry Tomatoes
Begin your own home garden—if time and space allow
I’m very fortunate to have a balcony at home, so I recently started growing my cherry tomatoes (since they’re the easiest ones to grow) using a planting kit from Paris Garden (which I received as a gift, but you can easily get from supermarkets like Fusion). We’ve also been growing herbs such as basil and mint for awhile, which is easy and makes for perfect homemade dishes like pesto pasta! Of course, not everyone has the outdoor space to do so, but if you can, this is a great way to reduce food miles and food waste, while increasing the nutritional value of your food. Alternatively, something you can do indoors is grow microgreens. Awhile back, Sprouts in a Jar kindly sent me a sample of their seeds. In just a few days, I was able to eat my own alfafa sprouts. You can find many of their other products on their website. This is not sponsored; I just love their products and how they make urban farming accessible to people living in small spaces such as homes in Hong Kong!
Community Garden in Discovery Bay, Hong Kong
Community gardening
If your home space really doesn’t allow for the cultivation of plants, there are many places where you can rent out plots of land and partake in a community garden in Hong Kong. In Discovery Bay, for example, residents can pay an annual or monthly fee to rent a rectangular plot to grow their own produce. There is also a list of community gardens where you can find plots of land around different districts of Hong Kong.
Share food with your community
This point brings in another aspect of eating sustainably in Hong Kong: minimizing food waste. As the common statistic goes, if food waste were a country, it would be the third greatest greenhouse gas emitter behind China and the United States. Not only does wasting food waste all the resources that went in to its production—from the water and energy used to produce and transport it, to the nutritional value it once contained—when food decomposes in the landfills, it also emits methane gas, which is 21 times more potent than CO2—leaving an even greater impact on climate change. Moreover, it’s a shame to see our precious food being discarded as waste.
So, while food waste increases and community ties decrease, a solution to tackle both concerns would be to forge a sharing community with neighbours and friends nearby. There are apps in places like London that exist to promote this practice (such as OLIO and Too Good to Go), but as this is still missing from Hong Kong, we can make this happen ourselves by interacting with each other. Remember those days when neighbours would actually speak to each other? And sometimes even bring offerings to each others’ houses when extra goods were baked? We can go back to doing things like that, with the benefits of building community and minimizing environmental damage.
Graham Street Market, Hong Kong
All of the solutions above help tackle food waste—a problem which saturates our landfills and constitutes almost 40% of our municipal waste in Hong Kong. Every day, an equivalent to the weight of 250 double decker buses (3600 tonnes) of food waste is thrown out, and a non-profit estimates that supermarkets alone throw away 29 tonnes of food a day, enough to feed 48,000 3-person households. Globally, one-third of all food that is produced ends up lost or waste in our food production and consumption systems, totalling to a worth of over one trillion U.S. dollars.
Another way to alleviate this issue is by only getting what you need. This can be achieved by buying in bulk, with less packaging and thus less plastic-waste. Opt for bulk food stores if you’re near—and this isn’t limited to Live Zero or Slowood. This can also be the local wet markets and medicine stores that have been offering products in bulk since the beginning of time. Research from 2018 states that there are 215 wet markets scattered across the 18 districts of Hong Kong. Just make sure you bring your own bag or container to avoid accepting extra waste. Also, keep in mind that many of their produce is also imported from abroad, so always try to ask where their food is from for extra measures.
There’s also a wonderful ideology that was coined by the chef and environmental activist, Max La Manna: more plants, less waste. His book, centered around this mantra, is a testament to the abundance of ways in which food can be made healthy, sustainable, plant-based, and delicious. Furthermore, to quote Daisy Tam, founder of FoodWorks, “waste is not an inherent, fixed category, it is produced by classification systems.”
But of course, even when we make every conscious effort to eliminate waste—food or others—we’ll inevitably continue to have scraps—whether it be the peels of bananas or cores of apples.
So what can we do with that?
Before you disregard it as waste and send it to the landfills, this is where we can introduce composting—in other words, “repurposing our surpluses”. This an extremely underrated practice that needs to be utilized more often—not only to benefit our environment but also our health. I like to describe composting as a master solution, because while its commonly perceived as a ‘farmer’s hobby’, it can tackle many aspects of climate change and food security—from the quality of our waterways to the quantity of our food.
When considering the ways in which nature and humans have been built to work in harmony, composting seems like an obvious solution. Applying a thin layer of compost can set off an ongoing positive feedback loop that brings more carbon into the soil each year, and by returning nutrient-dense items (food scraps) into our earth, they act as a natural fertilizer—which prevents unhealthy chemicals from depleting our soil and leaking into the waterways. In eating food that is cultivated in harmony with nature, we are also practicing harvesting methods that maximise the contribution of ecosytems and improve resilience and adaptation in the face of climate change. This also helps when you’re growing your own plants; the nutrient-rich fertilizer will allow for better growth and generate a larger yield. If you don’t have a garden, you can also donate your compost to families/farmers nearby—serving to build community once again.
While composting may seem inaccessible in an urban setting like Hong Kong, there are many guides online which detail how this can be accomplished anywhere. I have yet to start doing this myself—as I am still in the process of identifying/setting up a compost bin in my area—but HK composting is an invaluable resource if you’re looking to get started. They have compost bins scattered around the city, and all you need to do is sign up.
The most common types of composting for smaller spaces are Bokashi and Vermicomopsting. Here are some resources to learn more:
Lastly, while individual action can span a long way when it comes to eating sustainably in Hong Kong, because our current model of food supply—the reliance on the rural to support the urban—is inherently unsustainable, we may need to turn to a food sovereignty approach to increase food security in Hong Kong. As defined by La Via Campesina, “food Sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems." Prior to the 1950s, nearly all of the food consumed in Hong Kong was produced locally. However, rapid industrialization caused the economy to depart from agriculture as a dominant industry, leading to the loss of approximately 10,000 hectares of agricultural land. One way we can take our food activism to the next level is by supporting local movements to resist government structures that depend on and promote unsustainable land distribution and access and urge the government to implement policies that incentivise local food production in Hong Kong. Not only would this bring consumers and producers closer together, but it would also value food providers instead of eliminate them as a centerpiece of our society. After all, veganism and sustainability implies compassion towards all living beings, and this includes people.