Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Food
This is commendable: I'm blogging with an alarmingly high frequency. But I'm sure no one's complaining, right?Recently, I've had sooo many lectures and discussions with people about food. Well, to be specific, the environmental impacts of food. Now that I think about it, I would not have imagined the turn towards environmental science and policy if you asked me what I was going to do two years ago. I still remember the NUS scholarship interview, where I was like, "I'm interested in the biomedical sciences, hope to go into research and maybe work in a pharmaceutical company". Completely ignorant. haha..but I digress. Back to eating. The cumulative effect of so many talks and discussions is a more well-informed but even more confused mind. Here are just some of the things I learned (and also the caveats that makes me want to throw up my hands in despair) :
1. Most people know that it's better to be vegetarian because the higher you go up in the food chain, the more energy is lost. Add to that the often unethical treatment of reared animals and the choice seems obvious. But apparently, as one speaker pointed out, rice has one of the highest carbon footprint (amt of carbon dioxide emissions) among the foods. Go figure. (on a side note, i was getting milk, eggs and sausage for breakfast the other day when my friend looked at my plate and went: hmm..the carbon footprint of your breakfast is pretty high...omg)
2. Many fisheries are in decline and unsustainable. So there are seafood guides that tell you what types of seafood can be eaten, and what you should avoid. BUT, as it turns out, these lists are generic and the status of each species varies from place to place. Also, small scale, independent fisherman actually bring in more catch per unit of fuel used, but it's hard to certify them as sustainable, and so even if you pick only seafood with the sustainable label, you might not be doing the best you can..
3. There's a growing concern that with globalisation, food is traveling over long distances before being eaten, which contributes to increased fuel consumption. So the thing to do would seem to eat locally grown stuff. However, turns out that it's not so simple (DUH). Depending on a variety of factors, such the the means of transportation, amount of food transported etc, you could actually be better off environmentally drinking orange juice made from concentrate imported from a country far away than buying oranges from a nearby farmer and squeezing the juice yourself. (barring health and taste considerations)...
And the list goes on. On one level, all this really interesting and important to me. On another level though, I think it's terrible that eating has become such a complicated thing. Came with the complexity of civilization and maximization of efficiency and stuff, i know, but sometimes I just feel like we are just finding more complicated (non)solutions in answer to already complicated problems. Oh, to add to that, I just learned that the UK wastes a third of its food and the US a fourth. Meanwhile, there are millions of people starving elsewhere (and even in these countries themselves).
The world is a messed up place.
boonshan at 8:34 AM