Food purchasing doesn't have to be irresponsible. Today, there are options that allow you to promote social and environmental sustainability through food purchasing. You can promote local, organic, and fair trade products that help the planet be greener and more socially responsible. The following tips on sustainable food for events are adapted from BlueGreen Meetings:

• Purchase condiments, beverages, and other food items in bulk instead of individually packaged.
• Ensure food and beverage packaging is recyclable, and that it will be recycled.
• Ask your supplier to buy local produce that is in season, to avoid costly transportation of goods.
• Require all coffee to be fair trade, shade grown, and organic.
• Request organic produce, and free-range, growth hormone-free eggs and meats.
• Offer vegetarian meal selections: vegetables consume less land base and energy to produce.
• If your event is for more than 20 people, ask attendees to ‘sign-up’ for meals instead of assuming that
everyone will want to partake. This will reduce food waste – and your costs.
• Allow attendees to pre-select their meal sizes beforehand. Some people may not want all of the
courses; others may want smaller portions. Pre-selection will cut down dramatically on food wastage.
• Arrange to have leftover food donated to a local food bank or soup kitchen.
• Compost unusable leftover food portions or ship them to a local farm as pig feed.
• Use reusable cutlery, dishware and linens.
• Choose centerpieces and decorations that can be reused, such as living plants, or silk flowers.

Localharvest.org and eatwellguide.org are two websites that offer comprehensive directories of local food resources in your area. Use these guidelines when choosing a catering service for an event, or preparing meals on your own.

Mr Green's (from Sierra Club) 10 Food Commandments

1. Use Less Meat More Creatively. Americans consume 185 pounds of beef, pork, and poultry per capita each year. It would be better for our health and the environment to knock back fewer bacon burgers, steaks, and chicken wings.

2. Buy Organic. Organic farmers and ranchers are not allowed to use chemical poisons on their crops and livestock and, in general, are better stewards of the land. Yes, you will end up paying more for your meals because it usually costs more to produce food organically. But if you follow the rest of the advice on this list, you should be able to reduce your costs enough to make up the difference.

3. Support Local Farmers. Small farmers need all the help they can get, thanks to decades of failed agricultural policies. If you're close to one of the country's 3,700 farmers' markets, make it part of your shopping routine: its suppliers don't have to ship their products halfway across the continent or the world. If you can't make it to the market, consider community-supported agriculture, which provides subscribers with regular deliveries of delectables from area producers. LocalHarvest has a searchable online database of CSA farms at www.localharvest.org/csa.

4. Cut Back On Processed, Packaged Foods. Food packaging accounts for 20 million tons of waste annually. In addition, processed foods contain less nutrients than fresh foods, and tend to contain more artificial chemicals.

5. Seek Green Variety. Anybody who claims vegetables are boring should visit a Mediterranean country. On Crete, where people have the longest life expectancy in the world, they eat twenty-six kinds of wild plants. Yet we're stuck with 3.5 million tons a year of iceberg lettuce. It takes thirty-six calories of fossil-fuel energy to grow and ship one calorie of iceberg lettuce.

6. Be Picky With Fish. Fish is still a healthy choice, despite the news that the world's fisheries are being strained and that some seafood may contain dangerous levels of mercury or dioxin. The trick is to try tasty but less popular alternatives that eat lower on the food chain, like sardines, or sustainably farmed varieties like catfish. Consult the Monterey Bay Aquarium's seafood guide at www.seafoodwatch.org and the Sierra Club's "Mercury Survival Guide" at www.sierraclub.org/mercury.

7. Shop In Style. Paper or plastic? How many billions of times must the country's weary grocery clerks repeat this tiresome question? Next time you hear it, say "neither" and use your reusable bag. And for all the fuss about bags, remember it takes a lot more oil to drive to your grocery store than to make the bags you are given. So, if possible, leave the car in the garage and make human-powered shopping trips part of your fitness program.

8. Make Your Own. Healthy and tasty meals, from cereals to sautes to soups, can easily be made from scratch. Individually packaged instant oatmeal, for example, costs about three to four dollars per pound, while plain old oatmeal, sold in bulk, sells for a fourth as much, leaving you plenty of resources to experiment with oatmeal cuisine.

9. Grown Your Own. Lawns surrounding 85 million U.S. residences take up at least 25 million acres. Digging up just a fraction of this real estate to grow chard, lettuce, peas, and tomatoes would be a marvelous development. You'd save money of food, and some of the millions of gallons of oil used to ship it from farm to market.

10. Recycle and Compost. Recycling is so old hat by now that it may seem unnecessary to harp about it. Yet only about half of our aluminum cans are recycled, resulting in a big waste of energy and metal. Recycling is just as important with food scraps. Composting could drastically reduce the almost five hundred pounds per household per year of organic matter haunted to dumps, and creat fertile soil for your vegetable garden.

For more information, click here. To check if your food has pesticides, click here.