My daughter is the cutest baby on the planet. Childbirth is the most incredible experience of your life. And becoming a parent does seem to make you think about the world, and its future, in a whole new light.

"Sustainability" -- that vague term we hear these days about caring for the future -- takes on new meaning when you have a direct connection to at least one of the people who will populate it. And this new appreciation of sustainability means I'm thinking about food differently, too.

Ripple effects
It has never been clearer how what I eat matters, not only to me but to another human being -- my growing, changing, almost-teething daughter. I've long believed that the choices about what we eat have ripple effects beyond our own bodies. As a mom, this is no longer abstract to me. It's real; I see it in my daughter, every day, as she gets bigger and stronger.

Of course, we're not all mothers. We are, however, all eaters. While it might not be as direct a connection, the connection is there nonetheless: What we eat has an impact on other people; what we eat affects the world.

Sure, many of us may think about the health impacts of our diets. And most of us ponder what the bite will do to the bulge -- or the potential bulge. But today, many of us are also beginning to wake up to the ecological impacts of our food choices. To take but one example, we're increasingly concerned about the chemical pesticides used on food crops, those chemicals that can so damage the birds and the bees and turn up as potentially carcinogenic or hormone-disrupting residues in the food on our plates.

More recently, we're beginning to wise up to the connection between the food at the end of our forks and the climate crisis. For the food system, from seed to plate to landfill, is one of the primary contributors to global warming. The livestock sector alone accounts for 18 percent of the total global warming effect, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

How we produce our food, including our meat and dairy, is no longer a natural act; it's an industrial one. Our industrialized food system is addicted to greenhouse-gas emitting fossil fuels. And in the process of producing our food, we're emitting carbon dioxide (not to mention methane and nitrous oxide) from the processing, packaging, shipping and waste disposal of the processed foods and factory-farmed meat that make up so much of our diet.

When we make food choices today -- when we reach for that whole, healthy organic apple, when we decide to cut back on the amount of factory-farmed meat and dairy we consume -- we can do so knowing it's better for our bodies, it's better for our children and it's better for the climate.

This isn't metaphor; it's biology
When I was about 30 weeks pregnant, I was talking with a friend about my soon-to-be-born daughter.

"You realize, don't you," my friend said, "that your daughter already has all the eggs she will ever produce?"

It took me a moment for the concept to sink in: At 30 weeks old, my daughter already had all her fingers and toes, her lungs and her four-chambered heart. She also had all the eggs she would ever create. In me, I realized at that moment, are the seeds of my grandchildren, just as inside my grandmother was born the seed of me.

This isn't metaphor; it's biology. And it's this lesson we can remember when we consider the connection between our body's health, the health of our children and the future of the planet.