Food
What was the last meal you had? Maybe it was a yummy breakfast of eggs and toast, or a hamburger and french fries for dinner. Have you ever thought about all the things that went into that hamburger you ate? What did it take to get to your plate? This section will dive into the environmental impacts of food, from water usage to food transportation to waste. We will go through the farm to table process, analyzing the climate implications of every step. Let’s go!
Land & water usage
First, let’s look at water: the foundation of pretty much everything on our planet. A commonly cited statistic is that 71% of Earth’s surface is covered in water, but do you know much of it is clean and usable for food and drinking? Watch this Ted-Ed video about the possibility of running out of clean water and be prepared to answer a few questions afterward.
Here’s some food for thought:
Q: What are some sources of freshwater that are accessible to humans? Did you know about all of them? If you didn’t know about one or more of the freshwater sources, look it up and write about it here.
Q: Set a timer for 2 minutes and write down a list of what you use water for every day. What did you come up with? What are some ways you can reduce your water consumption?
In addition to our water, the relationship between humans and the land is complex and interconnected: our usage of the land affects the climate, and in turn, the climate impacts how we can use the land. This is seen in wildfires and deforestation, which have been touched on in previous sections. The land plays a pivotal role in what foods we are able to grow, how people are able to live, and the overall health of our climate. Droughts reduce fertile land, deforestation disrupts water cycles and habitats, and floods can suffocate plants. And the actions of humans, the carbon we emit and the land we clear, makes many of these natural disasters more common. Watch this video by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the connection between land usage and water.
Q: How did the images throughout the video make you feel? What were you surprised by? Summarize some of the adverse land effects of climate change and the implications (hint: what happens with extreme weather events? How does that affect food security?).
Something to note before we move on is the connection between deforestation and land usage. Agriculture requires a lot of land to grow crops for human and animal consumption and to have enough space for animals to live. The land needs to be flat and cleared to be usable for modern agriculture. As you can probably imagine, forests are often cut down to create suitable land for industrial agriculture, leading to habitat loss and other dangerous impacts you learned in the deforestation section. You will learn more about some of this in detail throughout the rest of the section.
Diet
Next let’s talk about how our diet impacts the climate. What is the climate impact of the food we eat? How can we improve our diets to be less harmful to the environment? Does it really make a difference? Watch this video from Climate Lab about how your diet is connected to climate change and what changes you can make to be more environmentally conscious. Then, watch the Center for Investigative Reporting video to dive deeper into the climate impact of beef.
To see what you learned, take this quiz from the Climate Lab. Good luck!
Q: Are you surprised? What did you learn?
When we think about the environmental costs of our food, many of us don’t consider the land used to grow food for livestock, fertilizers, or the water required for the animals. If you are interested in learning more, check out this NBC News article with a few suggestions of diet changes.
- How our diets impact climate change — and what we can do about it, NBC News Article
Q: Reflecting on what you’ve just learned about agricultural emissions and land use, what are your two biggest takeaways? Take some time to consider how learning this information makes you feel and what you can do to potentially change your lifestyle or inform others.
Food transportation
Alright, so now we know about the land and water needed to grow or manufacture the good, whether it is plant based or meat. How is that food transported? How does your food get from where it is produced to your house?
Q: Brainstorm a quick list of some of the intermittent steps in the food transportation process.
After you’ve made your list, read this article from Harvard University about a concept called “Food Miles.” While reading, make a list of some vocabulary words or keywords relating to food transportation and food miles.
Here’s a brief list of some things you might have written down. Compare your list to ours:
- Local Food Movement
- Food Miles (Food Carbon Footprint)
- Carbon Costs of Production
- Consumption of Animal Products
Q: How do these terms relate to each other? Is there a common thread that you see?
Below is another article from the State of Oregon Department of Environmental Quality that discusses some of the same topics but provides some insight into different methods of transportation, the distribution of energy used by the food system, and consumer shopping impacts. After watching another video, you’ll be writing a short paragraph reflection of these sources, so consider making a list of the topics that you find interesting.
- Food Transportation Review Sheet, Oregon.gov
If you are interested in this topic or want to hear another perspective, watch the following Ted Talk with environmental studies professor Peter Newton.
Q: Write a reflection about what you learned or things you found interesting about the environmental costs of food transportation. Below are a few things to consider:
- What are food miles? What are sources of pollution in the food production and transportation process?
- What are some of the solutions to this pollution? What do you think is the best plan forward in this area?
- What are some benefits and drawbacks to buying local food? In your opinion, how much of our food should we be buying locally?
Food waste
Next step on our journey: food waste. When you are done eating your dinner at a restaurant, what does your plate typically look like? Is it clear or do you have some food left? Now scale that up to everyone in your state, your country, and the rest of the world. How much food do you think goes uneaten? You just learned about the climate impact of producing food on the environment, but what about food waste? Watch this video from Climate Lab to learn about the food waste problem and a few solutions.
Let’s remind ourselves of a statistic from the video: 40% of the food produced in the US never gets eaten! When this food waste decomposes, it releases greenhouse gases, harming the planet. At MIT, The FoodCam is a device that allows people to place leftover food under a camera, take a picture, and share with the office, working to reduce the amount of food that goes to waste. At UC Santa Barbara, removing food trays in the cafeteria reduced food waste by 50%. At Copia, people who have extra food are connected with those that need food, so that the amount of food wasted decreases. What innovative solutions!
Here are a few short podcast episodes (about a minute each) that focus on 3 solutions to reduce food waste associated with behavioral psychology. Listen to each of them and be prepared to answer a few questions afterward. The first podcast focuses on smaller apples, the second on removing trays, and the third on composting.
Q: Which of the solutions did you like the most from the Climate Lab video and the podcasts? Which do you think would be most effective? How does behavioral psychology play a role in bringing about these changes?
Fishing & aquaculture
Throughout this chapter of the course, we’ve talked a lot about land-based agriculture, but it is important to remember that a huge part of our nutritional diet comes from the ocean. Every prawn, crabcake, and piece of sushi that we consume comes from the mass seafood industry. In 2018 alone, global fish production is estimated to have been about 179 million tonnes (1 tonne = 1000 kg), and 156 million tonnes were for human consumption. Due to the increasing demand in seafood, fish species have been overfished and hunted to the point of extinction, disrupting migration patterns and decreasing biodiversity. For example, bottom trawling, a commercial fishing technique, takes giant nets and drags them across the ocean floor to pick up fish, stirring up sediment and damaging the corals there. To give you a sense of the global scale of bottom trawling, the United Nations estimate that up to 95% of global ocean damage is directly caused by bottom trawling. Blast fishing (watch the following video) and cyanide fishing are also extremely harmful but common practices in the fishing industry.
Q: With information from the blast fishing video and your own research, describe how these two practices are detrimental to marine life.
In other words, we have dwindled our supply to the point where it is insufficient for our demand. And to fulfill demand, the fishing industry has become largely reliant on aquafarms and fisheries as modes of farming fish. Read this article for an introduction to aquaculture, and this Ted-Ed video to learn about a few aquaculture strategies.
- What Is Aquaculture and Why Do We Need It?, Global Aquaculture Alliance article
Q: Briefly summarize the four steps of the aquaculture production chain.
Q: How is aquaculture more sustainable than most other farming practices?
Q: Pick one of the following: large pens offshore, man-made coastal pods, and fish farming on land. What are the benefits and drawbacks of your chosen method?
From the article, we can see that aquaculture is one of our most sustainable feeding options, but there are drawbacks that we should be aware of. Check out this Roundtable video to learn about the ways in which aquaculture can actually further damage the ocean environment.
Q: Overall, what are the environmental ramifications of aquaculture? Can you think of other consequences?
In addition to possible disease outbreaks and disrupted ecosystems, aquafarms are also contaminating our oceans. When fish are confined in the tightly packed, fenced off cages, the water can become toxic with parasites, feces, and antibiotics and spread to wild fish populations. In Japan, the amount of waste generated from aquafarming is so high that one ton of fish generates the same amount of waste as 73 people per day. To add another negative impact, because most farmed fish are predators, fish farmers often take their prey from the wild to feed the farms. In fact, it takes five pounds of wild ocean fish to feed one pound of farmed fish.
So what does this mean for us? Our fishing industries are not only wreaking havoc on beautiful and plentiful marine life but also posing new risks for public health. The concentrated waste that is released into the ocean will be transmitted to the wild fish - the same fish that we excessively hunt for consumption. Already in increasingly warm and acidified waters, our seafood sources may end up having high levels of heavy metals, bacterial diseases, and parasites. Especially for coastal communities that depend highly on seafood nutrition, aquafarming might not be the sustainable answer that many preached it would be.
Optional: This is a great TED Talk from Perry Raso, an aquaculturist who is passionately advocating for sustainable aquaculture in our future industrial practices. Many of his points overlap with what you’ve already read in this section, but feel free to watch this if you’d like to explore sustainable aquafarming further and hear from his perspective!
Fishing is just one industry out of the many, many systems that humans have created to benefit us. But as we advance in innovation and technology, we must ask ourselves how our actions will affect the Earth in the long term and how that resulting environment will impact our lives. Do the benefits truly outweigh the costs?
Farms of the Future
Other than aquaculture, there are many other solutions researchers are experimenting with. Let’s look at some videos to learn more! The first one is a TedEd video about creating a perfect farm. This video focuses on innovative ways that countries around the world are changing their farming practices to be more eco-friendly, such as smart crop monitoring, intertwining animals, and cultivating a variety of crops.
What did you think of the innovative farming techniques? What surprised you about them?
Q: Pick one of the countries mentioned, and describe their agricultural developments and the benefits of these practices.
If you think about combating climate change, the first thing you’d probably think of is some sort of emission reduction—less fossil fuels being burned, less waste, something like that. But what about all of the carbon that is already in the atmosphere? To undo the damage to the atmosphere, we need to remove the CO2, which is known as drawdown. One such technique is regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture looks to reverse climate change by taking carbon out of the atmosphere and trapping it in the soil. Let's watch this video to learn a little more!
In this video, Lucy Biggers visited the Rodale Institute to learn more about regenerative agriculture. Here, we learn that harnessing the microbes in the soil is key to the practice - keeping grounds covered with crops year round allows solar energy to be collected, microbial life to be nourished, and the ground to become rich with carbon. The Rodale Institute is conducting a 40 year study comparing organic and conventional farming - in the beginning the conventional system performed better, but as time progressed, with techniques like crop rotation, natural fertilizers, cover cropping, and usage of animals, organic farming has caught up to conventional methods.
Q: Which technique did you find most interesting? Pick one method and explain the reasoning behind it.
To learn more about regenerative agriculture, check out this site. Below are a few suggested articles.
Permaculture is a bit tricky to define, but involves creating solutions that allow us to work with nature, as opposed to against it. We want to allow the land and humans to work together to provide mutual benefits in a symbiotic relationship. Watch this following video from Our Changing Climate and read the article to learn a bit more about permaculture.
* [What is permaculture?](https://medium.com/permaculturewomen/permaculture-what-it-is-and-what-it-isnt-834266a54d20), Medium articleQ: After watching the video and reading the article, how would you describe permaculture in your own words? What is the goal of interactions between nature and humans in permaculture?
In this chapter, we hope to have given you a good understanding of the climate impacts of our food, whether it be plants, animals, or fish. In the Farms of the Future section, you’ve been introduced to a number of different techniques and innovative strategies, but these are certainly not all. If there is one you are particularly interested in, do more research and learn about it! There’s always more to learn.
Next: Transportation
