Thursday, November the 1st, 2007.

Today’s Food Consumption Sustainability Index: 75%

Halloween last night, but unfortunately no organic pumpkin on the menu. In fact, it is hard to find pumpkin at all in Sweden. I was shocked when my Swedish corridor mates told me they had never eaten pumpkin before. I always thought pumpkin was a Northern European food – possibly because we always eat it with potato in New Zealand, and everyone knows the Swedes love their potatoes.

Anyway, I digress. The highlight today is an all-organic salad of tomatoes, cucumber (yum-yum), feta and rucola. I haven’t had feta for so long, so it is hard to say if this one tastes better than the usual, but it tastes pretty good to me. The tomatoes are plump, consistent and juicy, and without that disconcerting matte-like sheen and vaguely chemical smell that comes with the conventional ones here. But maybe that’s all in my mind…

The salad is accompanied by avocado on toast. The avocado is not a revelation, but it is flawless and that in itself is enough to put me in high spirits: nothing depresses me like a bad avocado. Unfortunately, my bread remains stubbornly conventional - I am yet to find organic loaves at COOP or ICA.

Overall, I am really enjoying the experiment. I guess the initial idea was that the “change” I would be making would be for the duration of the week-long experiment. I never presumed that I would actually “buy-in” to all these products in the long run. But now that I have forced myself to dive in at the deep-end, I take a genuine interest in what I am consuming. I find myself reading articles on organics in the newspaper, I take a look at the eco-label websites, and I regret not being able to read all the nutritional information in Swedish on the back.

No doubt I will lose the rice-water and oatmeal at the end of the week, and the organic garlic might be a bit too small-scale to perceive any benefits, but I will be much more aware of these products as I walk around the supermarket in the future, and open to the idea that I personally might be receiving more than is calculated on the weight/price ratio.

Economic Sustainability Tip of The Day: Organic Milk – 90% more nutritious and only 5 ore more expensive. Why doesn’t everyone make the switch?