So I'm walking through Trader Joe's in Huntington Beach with my favorite uncle, who happens to work at a Trader Joe's in Chicago. He's retired from teaching and decided to work a few hours a week at a place he really loves. If you aren't familiar wtih Trader Joe's, it's as much a cultural phenomenon as it is a grocery store. There are 300 hundred of them, mostly in the West and East Coasts, yet each one feels like a neighborhood Mom and Pop shop filled with uniquely branded food, funky signs, and friendly staff members who seem to actually enjoy their jobs. And then there are the customers, who for the most part appear to be college-educated-Birkenstock-wearing-eat-healthy-care-for-the-planet kind of people who are fiercely loyal to their favorite grocery store.

Those words pretty much described my uncle before he began working for TJ's (except for the Birkenstock part--he wears regular shoes). Now that he has a few months under his belt as a TJ's crew member (that's what they call their employees), you can add another descriptor: evangelist. And not just about TJ's, but about food and eating and the effect both of these have on our planet. I'm cool with that. No one's going to argue that eating the right kinds of food is important. But what do food and eating have to do with the planet? As I found out from my TJ's flag waving uncle, plenty.

He made one comment in particular that got my attention, and it has to do with one of my favorite foods: salmon. I love salmon. It tastes good, it's good for you (all those Omega 3 fatty acids), and it's a great alternative to meat, which I've been cutting down on due to higher-than-desired cholesterol. Little did I know that salmon is quickly becoming the scourge of food activists, and it has little to do with mercury levels. What I didn't know--and what my uncle quickly told me--is that salmon are carnivores. What that means is that salmon eat other fish. No big deal, until you realize that because of salmon's worldwide popularity, it takes a lot of fish to feed farmed salmon.

To be precise, thirty million tons--about a third of the world's wild catch of fish--goes into the manufacture of fish meal and oil, much of which is used to raise farmed salmon. By comparison, fish like carp and tilapia are herbivores, so eating them actually helps the world's fish population.

I know this is just one little example, but it got me to thinking. Are there other things we routinely consume--whether food or other commodities--that have similar negative effects on our natural resources? That's when I looked at the plastic water bottle sitting on my desk.

I've often thought about the phenomenon of bottled water, but in these terms: Why do we pay good money for something that's essentially free? For myself, I guess it has to do with taste and convenience, but does that justify the expense? I have to be honest, I wouldn't have given it a second thought last year, but in this current economic climate, I'm evaluating every expense, and cutting out bottled water--which doesn't represent a significant part of my budget, but is an expense that could be classified as "unnecessary"--isn't the worst idea I've had in the last month.

Then I did a little research and came upon a website called Bottled Water Blues which gave me more reason to evaluate my consumption of bottled water than simple economics. Among the facts posted on this site are these:

• Sixty million plastic bottles a day are disposed of in America
• Millions of gallons of fuel are used daily to transport bottled water around the world
• It requires three times as much water to make the bottle as it does to fill it

Whoa. That last one got to me, and I immediately thought of salmon. When we consume certain resources that consume other resources at an alarming rate, maybe it's time to change our habits. And it's not like we can't find other fish to eat or other water to drink. At least in the case of good old H2O, non-bottled water is probably better for us anyway. In the course of my ten-minute research, I was also surprised to find out that bottled water is no safer than the water that comes out of the tap. In fact, it may be less helpful. Bottled water doesn't contain flouride; municipal water does. And then there's the matter of the plastic itself. By now most of us know that over time, all plastic bottles leach synthetic chemicals into water. So depending on how long that plastic bottle sitting on my desk was first sitting in a warehouse, drinking bottled water could actually be harmful when compared to good old city water.

I'm no crusader on this stuff, but for now I have decided to wean myself off of salmon and bottled water. Is that a big deal? Not really. But what if a whole bunch of people did that? Would it help the world's fish supply? Would it help the already dwindling water supply? If the statistics are to be believed, it probably would. And the thing is, it's not inconvenient for those of us who routinely consume either salmon or bottled water or (in my case) both. And even if it were, would it kill us to give up some things that we don't really need (like a particular kind of fish or plastic bottles to hold our water) so that we can contribute to something that would actually do some good? Sounds like a net gain to me.

What began as a simple trip to Trader Joe's has now turned into something a little bigger. I guess I have my uncle to thank. Which I can do by buying more Trader Joe's Dunkers, which are just fantastic in Trader Joe's free trade coffee (wow, I really am turning into one of "them").