WASTE NOT, WANT NOT

Is a plant-based diet really the most sustainable way to live? ALIX DAVIS investigates.

ALIX DAVIS

What does it mean to eat sustainably today? A commonly accepted definition is that sustainable eating is choosing food that is healthy for both your body and the environment. And, given that raising livestock consumes one-third of the world’s freshwater, guidelines often suggest moving to plant-based eating. What if we reduced our reliance on traditional agriculture by learning to love invasive species instead? That’s the premise of artist and curator Kirsha Kaechele’s project and lavish art book, Eat the Problem. “It’s the practice of turning shit into gold,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “And solving multiple problems at once, which is what systems-based thinking is. An action has to do more than one thing. Which also gets us off the hook for the failure of any single goal: it catapults us out of a moral quandary (What is invasive? Should humans intervene once an invasive species takes hold?) and allows us to act. Eat the Problem is an idea that give us permission to be a part of the system while appreciating its complexity. But ultimately it’s about transforming a flaw into a feature.”