I’m not sure what you’ve got loaded on your iPod, but mine’s crammed full of Science Friday episodes, and Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me. I didn’t think that was so bad, until I disclosed this to a friend (or so I thought) and got a head shake in return. Because I’m grown up and I really don’t care a whole lot what people think of me (OK maybe a little) I’m keeping my nerdcasts and hence this leads to my blog today.
While doing my run-walk this morning (yes, back problems have forced me to me cut back on running and combine it with walking to eliminate the repetitive motion of my feet landing on the pavement and jarring my back over and over and over again, this back problem also has me stretching like a Yogi and working on my core, so watch out, I’ll be a buff cheerleader any year now), but back to what I was talking about. This morning I was listening to a story on how our diets affect our carbon footprint. The study comparing the carbon footprint of different aspects of our diets was performed by a civil and environmental engineer at Carnegie Mellon. Well heck, if I had been involved in studies like that, I may have never left engineering. But be that as it may, back to the story.
The research team determined that cutting out a meal of red meat and dairy once a week was actually more effective at reducing one’s carbon footprint than eating locally grown vegetables and fruits. This is a result of the production of methane and nitrous oxide generated by cows. Unless said bovines were fed a diet of Beano, but they didn’t mention that part of the research. Of course, coupling the reduction in red meat and dairy with eating locally grown veggies and fruits is even better.
And this brings me to a recent grocery shopping experience. In the fruit bin at the local Publix sat side-by-side, Florida oranges and California oranges. A year or two ago I wouldn’t have thought twice about it and surely wouldn’t have appreciated the irony that oranges (Florida’s fruit for crying out loud, we supply 75 percent of world’s orange market) are shipped from about as far away as you can get within the continental US. Can I get a “geeze Louise”? Because of my enlightened state, I reached past the non-native citrus instead picking up a bag of Florida’s finest.
So, have you made any food choices lately that were based solely on environmental reasons as opposed to health concerns? C’mon, dish.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Food Choices for a Healthy Planet
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2 comments:
Hmmm ... what happens if you buy red meat from local farmers?
My carbon footprint reduction is also my support local folks. I go to the farmer's market on Saturday mornings and spend too much money!
Oh, oh, oh, good question. That come up during the podcast. If you buy from local farmers you can ask them how they handle their manure (well, the cow's manure, not their own). If they use a methane digester to capture the methane and burn it for power, yay them.
Also, you can ask what they feed the cows. This came up during the podcast and I wished I was listening live so I could call in. The researcher said that cows fed a diet of grass (their natural choice for dinner) produced more methane than those on a corn-fed diet. BUT, what he didn't mention was: a. for cows to be corn-fed, their meals have to be driven to them, and 2. corn-fed cows require antibiotics because they get infections from eating corn because they're made to eat grass.
A blogger on terrapass http://www.terrapass.com/blog/ wrote on the carbon footprint-food topic and I was surprised by the comments hailing efficient travel. I hear what they're saying, but I find it hard to believe, as one commenter put it, that a bunch of separate people driving to a farmer's market has a comparable impact to that of food being transported across the country. Hmmmm....
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