When I am grocery shopping for the week, I never think about how the food I am buying if affecting the environment. What I do normally think of is first what these groceries are going to cost me and then I think about how healthy/unhealthy this food is. Until my College Writing food writing seminar, I never even linked what I eat and the environment. It is just so easy to lift food off the shelf and not even wonder or care where it came from as long as I am not going hungry. I never think about how far these vegetables may have travelled or the preservatives or chemicals that have made it so they lasted the journey.
Over the past couple of days, the steak dinner that I had on Sunday night probably had the biggest environmental impact. The meat industry has huge negative impacts on the environment from green house gas emissions, methane being the largest, to large amounts of water use to feed livestock. There was an interesting article published by Cornell University that actually stated the US could feed 800 million people with grain that livestock eat. This means that cutting down our meat intake could not only improve the environment but could also help feed millions of starving people around the world. Besides steak, along with my dinner I had some broccoli which according to the USDA probably came from either China or India because they are the two largest exporters of broccoli. If you think of the travelling that broccoli had to do in order to get on my dinner plate used a lot of oil and preservatives to make sure that it was still fresh by the time I ate it. I also ate some mashed potatoes which did come from Idaho because I saw the label but obviously still had a bit of a trip to make it to Washington, DC.
While I do realize the negative impact our food choices has one the environment, it is definitely not something I really think about. I think it is safe to say that it is also not something the general public really thinks about as well. Buying local and cutting back on a few things we eat are very easy ways for people to lessen their environmental footprint but just don’t know enough about it. I think it is something that should be brought up and discussed more so people really know about the impact of what they are eating. I think it would be effective to link personal health and environmental impact when it comes to making choices about food in order to get the public on board. For example realizing that buying local fruit or bread that does not contain preservatives or chemicals is better for your health as well as the environment. Changing decisions on food is just another lifestyle change that is going to require people to change their attitudes toward the environment.
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