When I began to examine the food that I ate I followed the food chain, like Manning suggested, back to the plants that were the basic ingredients in my food.
I realized, from Manning’s article, that the energy that it took to mine the metals that made the farm equipment and the fuel the equipment used, were significant. However, these fuel costs were hard to trace, as they depended on the lifetime of the tractor and it’s type.
Therefore, I mainly concentrated on the fertilizers, pesticides and other primary fuel inputs that went into my food.
Here’s a breakdown of what I discovered:
As you can see, all of the food that I consumed used pesticides and fertilizers. Therefore, everything that the food consumed during my 24-hour period were all small contributors to the huge environmental issues of today.
Manning discusses issues like acid rain, global warming, and the “dead zones” in the earth’s waters being the results of nitrogen runoff from fertilizer. I know that pesticides release equally harmful chemicals into our environment.
It disturbed me greatly to trace every food item back to its ingredients and find out that, in every way, my food choices are contributing to the very issues that I wish to combat.
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