Final Food Blog Post

After looking over my last blog post i have to say that my meal was definitely a problem in terms of having negative impacts on the environment. Nearly every part of the meal had either direct or indirect effects on the environment and they were overwhelmingly negative. Its safe to say that actions need to be taken to reduce the effects of food production, globally, locally and individually.
          To affect something on a global scale is very difficult as it requires the co-operation of billions of people. However, it can be achieved through the correct planning and organizing. One of the environmental effects from my meal was that i used plastic bags to carry the ingredients home, we know the devastating effects that they can have on the environment so i stick by what i said in my post concerning plastic bags, they need to be discontinued and banned globally. If this can be done and a proper replacement was put in place then the benefit to the environment would be fantastic. A limitation is what i said at the start, to affect something globally it required billions of people working together and agreeing which is very hard.
          Local change is done much easier but still requires hard work. Within a city or a state a change can be made through the local government and we see that with many cities banning the plastic bag e.g San Diego. I think a good way we can improve the negative effects from the transportation of food is by using locally grown produce where ever possible. This would reduce the carbon footprint of the food industry massively because less petroleum would be used in the lorries that distribute the produce. A limitation to this solution is that some foods need certain climates in order to grow so some things have to be transported a long way. A way around this is maybe to simulate the environment that the crops are grown in but this is hard to do on a large scale.
            Making a change comes down to individuals and whether they are willing to make sacrifices. A micro-scale change is the easiest one and the most important because it kick starts a change locally and globally. There are so many little things we can do to help our environment, from re using a plastic bag instead of getting a new one at the store to recycling your rubbish after your meal. A change i could have made from my meal was that i drove to the shop when i could have realistically walked there . By walking instead of driving i would have prevented the release of carbon emissions into the environment hence reducing the negative effects of the food industry.
           Overall i think its clear to see we need to start doing more to save our planet and making sacrifices is the only way we can accomplish this, its just a case of whether we are motivated enough to do it.

Blog 3

First of all let me recap on what my meal contained. I had lasagna with salad, the ingredients were pasta sheets, minced meat, cheese and multiple vegetables. There are multiple environmental effects that result from the production of my meal. To start with my meal contains meat and the environmental effects of meat production includes pollution through the use of fossil fuels, land and water. The livestock industry is one of the leading contributors to global pollution and cheese is a product obtained from animals so this can be in the category too. To produce food on a mass scale you need the use of large machines which are operated through the use of fossil fuels. There are agricultural machines that are used to harvest the crops initially then there are the machines in the factories that produce the final product. Also the use of fertilizers and pesticides during the growing stage of the production produces pollution to ecosystems.

    The tomatoes used in my meal were grown in Florida by Subelt, the Lettuce came from Jackson, Mississippi, the cheese was grown down in Southern Louisiana and the meat was produced in Alabama by ALFA farmers federation. 

    During the production of my meal, water is depleted as well as polluted. Groundwater is contaminated through the use of fertilisers and pesticides which in turn affects habitats and the ecosystem as a whole. Soil is also effected during agriculture through over-use of the land which can make lush fertile spots into barren wastelands.

    Oil is used to power the plants that produce the food contained in my meal. Around 10x more energy is used to produce meat than we actually get from it in calories. We all know the consequences of using oil and the effect on the environment through the greenhouse effect. I'm not sure which exact fertilizers and pesticides are used but i know that they are involved in the productions of crop which eventually ended up on my plate.

  Like i said in the previous paragraph the fossil fuels used in the production of meat contributes to the greenhouse effect but releases co2 into the atmosphere which traps heat and leads to potential risks like increased extreme weather, rising sea levels and melting the polar ice caps. Also it effects air quality with the releases of chemicals that are damaging to not only the environment but also human lungs.

   These effects on local in the fact that in the urban industrial areas the air pollution is a lot worse and the quality of air there is poor compared to the countryside rural areas but its also global in the fact that it contributes to the heating of the earth which leads to global effect mentioned in the last paragraph.

   I'm confident that all the products in my meal where made in the United States so none of them had to travel huge distances but still the effect from transportation is great. Transportation accounts for a large part of the total Co2 emissions in the United States and the food sector is a major contributor. They would have been transported from the different states into Mississippi and then transported from various warehouses to the supermarket i bought them from. 

     All the ingredients were made in the south so they are somewhat local but the lettuce was the closest because it was made right here in Mississippi and the tomatoes were the furthest away being made in Florida. 

     Packaging is a major pollutant and we saw in the 1st post on plastic bags. They alone are environmental hazards and that's what we usually use to transport are food home and that's certainly what i did. Also the packaging from the food was too much i thought, it could definitely be reduced. Fortunately we recycle our garbage so hopefully the packaging from this meal will end up being used again in some way shape or form.

My Latest Meal

I would love to be sitting here writing about the giant portion of fish and chips or the huge Sunday roast i had just ate, but unfortunately I'm 4000 miles away from home. In reality, the meal i ate last night was lasagna, and a pretty terrible one at that. The lasagna consisted of pasta sheets (3 layers) with tomatoes, onions, minced meat and a few peppers in between them. On top of the lasagna was melted cheese (the nicest part and the most unhealthy-what a surprise.) On the side i had a bit of salad that was basically lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes, grated carrot and ranch dressing. Overall its a pretty decent balanced meal, unfortunately it didn't taste of anything.

Post 1 - Jamie Bladen

Watching a documentary like that really gets you thinking about things you wouldn't even bat an eyelid at usually. Plastic bags are so common they are just a way of life really, but when you see the problems they cause you cant ignore them.
There were many impacts that the video stressed but the one that hit me was how plastic bags affected so many animals. The statistics were shocking, one being that 6 out of 10 animals in the slaughter house had plastic in them. The impact on marine life was eye opening when you consider that animals die simply because of carelessness on our part, basically you litter a plastic bag your killing an innocent animal for no reason.
The two main solutions were to use different materials or start recycling better. I think if we could recycle perfectly then there wouldn't be a problem but i think we know that's not going to happen, especially in developing countries that either don't have the resources to maintain recycling or the don't even have proper rubbish disposal systems. So i think we need to get rid of plastic bags and start using different materials and not only that we need to reuse bags more instead of getting a new one every time.
The Canadian manufacturer makes a good and true point that plastics bags are misunderstood but i don't have the faith in people that we would actually recycle well enough to stop plastic bags being a problem. To deal with plastic bag waste i think they should be completely banned from now and every bag should be sent to the same place, so the world can be cleared of plastic bags, they are too much of a problem. So i think its definitely a global problem and needs to be dealt with on a global scale.
Once again i believe if we keep using plastic bags and just say were going to recycle more the problem will never go away, we need drastic action to ban all plastic bags and start using a different material