If you have the option, choose your meat at the butcher counter and purchase only as much as you know you'll use. You'll reduce food waste, save money, and conserve resources. The average person wastes over twenty-two pounds of edible store-bought meat each year. Given that it takes five pounds of grain and 2,500 gallons of water to make on pound of beef, that's more than one hundred pounds of wasted grain and 55,000 gallons of wasted water per person! If all households decreased their beef purchases by just one pound a year, 250 billion gallons of water would be saved. It would take five days for this amount of water to pour over the Niagara Falls.

Try to limit purchases of canned fruit, and substitute fresh fruit whenever possible. The process involved with canning fruit is at least ten times more energy intensive than picking fresh fruit. If every US household replaced just one pound of canned or jarred fruit with one pound of fresh fruit during each of the three summer months, the total energy saved could operate the kitchen appliances of over 21,000 households for an entire year.

Choose sustainably harvested wild fish as opposed to farmed varieties. Farmed fish tend to have higher levels of heavy metals and are considered threats to endangered populations of wild fish species. Also, becasue farmed fish live in extremely close quarters, they generate a lot of waste. The volume of fish feces that enters the tide from the average fish farm is equal to a town of 65,000 people releasing their untreated raw sewage directly into the ocean.

Try doing some of your shopping at a local farmer's market. And if you can, walk or bike there. Of the total energy used in the US per year, 4% is used to produce food, and between 10 and 13 percent is used to transport it. On average, US supermarket food travels 1,500 miles to 2,500 miles before it reaches the family table. Buying local food can reduce the amount of petroleum consumed to transport your dinner by as much as 95 percent.

When you buy ground or whole-bean coffee, look for varieties with organic, Fair Trade, Bird Friendly, or Rainforest Alliance certification seals. These labels represent coffee farms that practice sustainable agriculture to preserve or restore rain forest ecosystems. Just one household switching to certified coffee for a year is enough to protect 9,200 square feet of rain forest. If everyone in Seattle switched to certified coffees, a rain forest area the size of that city could be saved every year.

Buy block cheese intead of presliced individually wrapped servings. The energy used to make the plastic wrappers for slices of American cheese amounts to the equivalent of more than 13.8 million gallons of gasoline per year--enough for the entire population of Milwaukee to carpool out west to visit the happy cows of California.

If you're planning to purchase several cans of the same product, look to see if a larger can is available. If you buy a 28-ounce can of stewed tomatoes instead of two 14.5-ounce cans, you'll not only save up to 50% on the price, you'll also reduce waste and conserve resources. If every month each US household substituted a larger can for two smaller ones, the annual savings in steel could build an Eiffel Tower on each of the six other continents.

You should definitely consider buying items in bulk. You will pay up to 50% less and significantly reduce the amount of energy needed to transport all that extra packaging waste to landfills and recycling facilities. If by buying in bulk every US household generated 10% less packaging waste, the volume of diesel fuel saved by garbage trucks annually would be enough to take a busload of schoolchildren on a field trip to the moon and back every day of the school year.

If you buy sliced bread from the bread aisle, try to find loaves that are packed in only a single wrapper. Double-wrapped loaves contain at least 20 percent more plastic packaging-per gram of bread. The waste generated by this additional wrapper across all households in the US and Canada would weigh nearly 60,000lbs -- or the total weight of all the food you will ever eat in your lifetime.

Besides tastier bread? If possible, buy your dinner breads fresh from the grocery store bakery. You can recycle the paper wrapper and save on energy used for freezing and transporting the shelf bought brands. If every US household served fresh-baked bread instead of packaged rolls for Thanksgiving dinner, the energy conserved could fly more than twenty-three thousand early colonists from England to Plymouth Rock.