celebrate earth week 2016!

It’s Earth Week. Let’s take a moment and celebrate the awe-inspiring planet we call home. Our planet provides all that we need to grow nutritious food and nurture personal vitality in balance with nature. But we can’t benefit from nature’s bounty if we destroy it. That’s why this Earth Day, we call to action all global citizens to help fight climate change and secure our future well-being.

Whether it’s improving the energy efficiency of our homes or buying less stuff we don’t need, there’s countless easy steps we can do, starting today. One way we can have an immediate impact is by buying responsibly grown food. Learn about Nutiva’s values for a responsible supply chain in this video.

What we choose to eat has been a growing topic of concern among climate advocates. Some foods are more climate beneficial than others; in other words, the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from making these foods are lower. For example, producing 1 kg of organic strawberries generates around 300 g of CO2 emissions, compared to four times as much or 13,300 g of CO2 generated by producing 1 kg of beef.

However, we need transparency in our food because our choices aren’t always so simple. Cattle grazing on grasslands for short periods at a time (e.g., mimicking the movement of migrating bison) actually help the soil sequester carbon and improve climate change. This is called carbon farming, and we supported a Carbon Farming Initiative in 2015 through our 1% giving program.

In addition to consciously choosing what we eat and supporting innovative technologies such as carbon farming, we need to better understand the climate cost of all our actions. This will enable us not only to make better choices, but also to mitigate our choices.

One way to mitigate the carbon we emit is through purchasing carbon offsets, which support programs such as tree planting that reduces carbon from the atmosphere. At Nutiva, we started a carbon-offset program to offset a portion of our farming and production emissions (see our 2015 Social and Environmental Responsibility Report).

We all need to work together to tackle the climate problem. As a food company, we recognize that the food industry contributes one-quarter to one-third of total greenhouse gas. Nowhere is there more potential for meaningful change, and we would rather be part of the solution than just the problem. How about you? Share how you want to be part of the solution and tag us with #EarthWeek and #ConsciousCurators. Click HERE to enter the giveaway!