BRYAN CHOW

This past week, I practiced mindful eating, that is, focusing on the food you are eating without being distracted with any sort of media. I admit it was a little difficult at first as the muscle memory engrained into my arm to reach into my pocket and see what's new on Instagram. I would say, though, after my fifth meal of this, I have grown to rather like it. Even though my meals have always been my "me" time, I find that they are even more so now that I only have myself as company while I eat as opposed to the hundreds of strangers' videos that I used to scroll through during lunch. The intent of this activity was to encourage people to finish all their food--but as a human vacuum that engages in quarterly eating competitions with my roommate, I feel like this was mainly an enrichment activity that strengthened my connection with food. Although, I admit to the few times that I have dumped leftovers into the trash. I witness this food waste in many occasions. Some people (like roommates 3 & 4) just grew up that way and don't even feel much guilt in doing so. The culmination of billions of people dumping Monday's dinner down the drain, as noted by the Drawdown Ecochallenge, "is responsible for roughly 8 percent of global emissions," not to mention the "energy, resources, and money that went into producing, processing, packaging, and transporting" that food. It's very sobering to realize that something as mindless as throwing away food has such wide scale impacts on our world. That's why in being more mindful while eating, you might come to realize and appreciate the labor and preparation and transportation needed for your dinner to arrive on your plate. On that same note, limiting food waste doesn't necessarily mean that you have to go past your breaking point and jam food down the throat. I have always been a proponent of keeping leftovers, that is, putting saran wrap over my plate and placing it in the fridge or, if I'm at a restaurant, asking for a to-go box to take home. Composting is another solution, but I am lazy as is and cannot fathom to water anything more water-needy than my succulent. I hope that in the future, I can also lower the burden of restaurants by using the TooGoodToGo app more often and buying their leftovers at the end of the day so that they don't have to toss uneaten food into the trash.

I'm here because I realize the important it is to make the first step to change. I took a course on environmental literature recently where I learned about the unfortunate reality of the current climate crisis and honestly it gave me a pretty daunting outlook on the future--almost paralyzing. After all, I'm just one person. What can I do about the tons of emissions being pumped out into the atmosphere? I think the main problem was that I didn't know what to do. Joining the EcoChallenge helps me take that first step. Even when facing a gigantic issue, it's all the little 1% or even 0.001% improvements that can add up to eventually a 5% change. And eventually that builds to a larger change for a better future.