Eating green with a Panda Express-gulping carnivore

TUCSON, Ariz. – So this semester I’ll be updating a blog for The Cat Scan concerning green eating.

Now for anybody who knows me, you would think that I’d be the last person to ever want to blog about green eating – or have anything to do with it for that matter.

After all, I’m a self-proclaimed carnivore who has only recently begun to touch salads as a 21-year-old and has always complained when his mother tried to feed him anything green, except for those delicious watermelon Jelly Beans. (And I don’t think they count).

But that’s exactly why I wanted to undertake this responsibility.

Healthy living is something that everybody should strive for, although it’s something I certainly don’t think about while wolfing down orange chicken from Panda Express or chicken nuggets from Chick-fil-A. Everybody talks about the importance of eating well and living healthy, but for most people – certainly me included – that’s just lip service.

As I embark on this journey of learning how to eat better, and hopefully start to integrate that into my lifestyle, it’s important to understand key terms involved with eating green, courtesy of the Food Network’s Web site.

A word commonly associated with eating green is “organic.” Any product that has a “USDA organic” label will be mainly free of pesticides, fertilizers and sewage sludge. Also the animal will have not been fed hormones or antibiotics, so they will be raised naturally.

A “sustainable” agriculture involves farming that’s good for the environment and animals that are raised in a humane way. This includes the “fair trade” label often associated with coffee that guarantees farmer earn a decent living for their product.

Also, “natural” means no artificial flavors have been added.

The terms “antibiotic-free” and “hormone-free” are fairly self explanatory in that obviously it means no antibiotics or hormones have been added to the food, respectively.

A final important term is “free range,” which basically means chickens are not just crammed into cages but have room to stretch their legs in a more humane way.

As I take you through green eating on the University of Arizona campus and around Tucson, be sure to refer back to these entries to have a full understanding of what it means to eat green.