Food's Environmental Impact

Much like Ciara said, before I came to AU, the thought that food and the environment could somehow be linked had never crossed my mind. I knew that the corn we bought every summer from the local farm was always the best and that the veggies we picked from my dad's garden always tasted better than anything we bought in the grocery store, even fresh produce, but somehow I never linked the two. Now that I'm at AU, though, I'm starting to see more and more how our food choices can affect the environment - everything from reusable shopping bags to cage-free eggs to local produce to grass-fed beef; concepts like this have been bombarding me for the past two years. Now that I'm more aware of these issues, I do try to buy more of my fruits and veggies from the farmer's market at AU or up by the National Cathedral on Mass. However, when I'm at the grocery store the environmental impact of my food is usually the last thing on my mind - and the first is price. Organic food, even at Safeway, is so much cheaper than the normal stuff that it's difficult to justify buying it (although my room mate and I have started buying organic milk; for some reason, it lasts longer before going bad). While I've read all the articles about how grass-fed beef is better, it's also more expensive, and I just can't bring myself to buy it at the store.

That being said, though, I think I have this sort of perverse attitude towards food, especially meat; I'll eat it, but I really hate knowing where it comes from. For example, my dad is a pretty passionate hunter, and he usually brings home at least one or two deer every year (usually from the field past our back yard). Eating venison is probably one of the most environmentally friendly things I could do - the deer are wild, so they eat sustainably; the environmental cost of transporting the food is the 20 yards my dad walks from the field to our house; and the deer population is a big problem in PA, so hunting deer actually helps prevent car accidents with them (or so my dad tells me). However, I've always thought shooting those deer was so cruel, and I always refused to eat any burgers or jerkey he made with the venison. I know the conditions the cows I eat live in are so much more cruel, but for some reason, because I don't have to see that, I can disconnect myself from it. I know that probably doesn't make any sense, but there it is.

Getting to the second part of this question, the food I've eaten in the past few days that probably has the most environmental impact is any of the meat I've eaten - either the chicken I had for dinner Sunday, the sausage on my pizza last night, or the ham I'm having tonight. The chicken probably had the most impact, though, because in addition to any original transport costs, it was from a frozen ready-made meal my room mate's mom had made, so the chicken also had associated with it the transportation costs is took my room mate to drive from Connecticut to DC. I think transportation associated with meat and produce is probably the biggest factor when considering environmental impact, but for meat, especially, we also have to look at methane emissions from cows, the pollution generated so many animals living in such close proximity, and other issues. None of these things are easy to think about, though, and I feel like a good proportion of people (myself included, at least partly) just ignore them.