Imagine this: You walk into a grocery store and are immediately surrounded by colorful fruits and veggies, sounds of cash registers beeping, and the cool air of the AC. It’s not long before you catch grocery store fever and begin placing items in your cart that you don’t need or haven’t considered carefully. Carelessly purchasing your grocery foods can not only empty your wallet, but it can also determine the amount of suffering that animals have to go through to end up in your cart.
Milk
When buying dairy milk, there are some factors that you should consider. For example, labels like “organic” promise no GMO’s and “pasture-raised” means grazing time for cows. Restricted grazing has become commonplace for those in the dairy industry, so buying from a place that has pasture-raised cows is the way to go. Another more humane method of choosing milk is looking for a local milk producer who isn’t being controlled by an industry. This is also good because you can more easily communicate with them and ask questions about the treatment of their animals.
Fortunately, the sale of dairy milk has been on the decline in recent years.
These charts provided by CNBC show that the gallons of milk consumed per capita has decreased by about 6 gallons from 2000 to 2015, and alternative milks have been on the rise. Alternative milks include nut milks like almond milk, soy milk, coconut milk and others such as oat milk and rice milk. Without the need for farming cows, non-dairy milks are obviously much more ethical. If you are concerned about the prices of alternatives because they have a reputation of being more expensive than cow’s milk, there is good news! Due to the declining demand of milk, prices have drastically increased for cow’s milk since 2018. This potentially means that more people are switching out dairy milk for alternative milk, and the demand may cause the substitute to become cheaper!
Eggs
Eggs are one of the more difficult things to choose when at the grocery store. There are so many different brands, colors, and labels that it may be difficult to sort through all of them. The first thing to take note of is if the eggs are cage free, free range, or pasture raised. To learn more about these terms read my post about it here! These labels ultimately determine how much space that the chickens receive. Pasture-raised is the safest bet as this means the chickens were able to roam in an open space, and they are probably healthier for you because of the seeds and insects the chickens consumed. Also, similarly to milk, looking for organic chicken eggs will ensure that the animals are not given hormones to affect their bodies in an unnatural way. Another thing to understand when purchasing eggs is that the color of the eggs, whether it be white or brown, does not matter in terms of health benefits or quality. In fact, the color of eggs purely depends on the breed of chicken that they are laid from. Therefore, you should only be looking for labels describing how the chickens were raised rather than basing your decisions off of color.
Meat
Of all of the food products, meat may be the most difficult one to find an ethical option for. Fortunately, the ASPCA has provided a list of logos to search for on chicken, beef, pork, turkey, and even dairy and eggs. You can research ASPCA approved brands on this list. The Global Animal Partnership has also created different levels of ethicality, which you can read about more in my post here. This system rates products from 1 to 5, 1 being the least ethical and 5 being the most.
However, these lists and systems should be utilized only when you really want meat. The best thing to do for the good of the animals is to try to cut down on your consumption of meat. If meat is something that will be difficult to cut out of your life, a more ethical option is consuming bison meat as opposed to other meats. Bison are not only more environmentally sustainable, but they are also less likely to be grain-fed and raised in factory farms. They are more well-protected by the government, and therefore are usually pasture-raised.
Fish
Many people think fish is an ethical alternative to meat. However, fish, like land animals, feel pain and are commonly mistreated as you can read about in my post here. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, only one quarter of the world’s fish stocks are within safe environmental levels. That means that 75% of fish are suffering from harmful treatment. In order to combat this abuse, shoppers can demand fish from sustainably-harvested seafood companies. This puts pressure on seafood retailers and causes them to provide products that are ethically sourced. A good way to see if a seafood product is from a humane company is by checking to see if it is MSC (Marine Stewardship Council) approved. The MSC is an international charity dedicated to saving fish stocks. They consider the “condition of the fish stock, the impact of fishing on the marine ecosystem and the management of the fishery.” If a brand passes all of the tests that the MSC runs, then they will be rewarded with an MSC approved label.
Other tips
If you are looking to cut down on your consumption of animal products, there are some tips that you should consider. First, you should make sure you do your research – this is the most important step of cutting back. You should find foods that can replace the meat that you would normally eat so that your body isn’t deprived of nutrients. Also, sudden change in diet may cause you to feel stress and begin a cycle of unhealthy eating habits. The last thing you want is to binge eat a bunch of meat after trying to completely abstain from it. A good tip that I learned is to try eating alternative meats to ease into the process and make you feel as if you are not completely taking it out of your diet. This process should be entered slowly to avoid depriving yourself. Removing animal products from your diet means taking a lot of fat and sodium out of your diet. This fat and sodium is what contributes to the irresistible taste of meat. However, you can find ways to ease into the process of getting rid of this, like using complex flavors of walnuts, avocadoes, pine nuts, etc. to bring flavor into your meals.