Journal 4: Food Footprint

If everyone lived like me, we'd need 3.8 Earths to sustain us all. Honestly, that surprises me; I originally took the test using what I did at home and took it this second time based on what I do in my dorm room, but I got the same score both times! Considering scores I heard other people get from the test, mine's in the lower range and I feel pretty good about it, but I want to reduce my waste further. My roommates are good about how much they use, recycling stuff, etc., but it's not quite the same at home with my family. To be frank, I live with pigs.

Like this but times five.

A LOT of changes need to be made, especially. For one thing, there's the need to teach my 24-year-old brother how to stop making so much trash and put recyclables where they belong. I'm religious about that and recently stopped buying bottled water to reduce the amount of plastic I waste and save money, but there's still more I can do too. For instance, I know little about how much gas, water, and electricity I use per month, so I want to find out. Money is a good way to motivate me to conserve something; I'm very cost-conscious.

The results seemed pretty spot-on to me. Despite my best efforts to be efficient, there are a lot of wasteful habits I'm just now starting to drop and many more behaviors that need tweaking. I love natural light and use that to light my room instead of electricity when I think about it, but I need to teach myself to use natural light until I can't see anymore!

The variety of ecosystems in one relatively small area was surprising when we went to ECHO. We went on a pretty lengthy tour and saw plants I didn't even think could grow in Florida. How can one space have such a diverse set of plants growing there? The monoculture fields with rows upon rows of the same crop have become so common it's almost a novelty to see biodiversity, and biodiversity on ECHO's scale is almost unheard of in mainstream agriculture. I'd love to learn how they got it all to happen so I could practice it myself.

Then again, I don't have much experience with gardening or growing my own plants. My family grew its own tomatoes for a time when I was a child and farming is in my background with my father, grandfather, etc. but suburban life distanced me from all that. Apart from keeping some gifted aloe plants alive and growing a few pots of flowers for science projects, I'm woefully inexperienced with gardening and distanced from the production of my food.

If I grew my own food, I'm sure I'd appreciate it much more the way my grandfather appreciates what he's able to raise in his fields. Knowing all the work that goes into it and how many factors the farmer has to worry about/plan for would make the fruits of my labor (pun intended) that much sweeter. Finding food wouldn't go so well, I don't think. I'd get pretty thin before I figured out what was and wasn't safe to eat.

Coming from a live of extreme privilege as I have, there hasn't been a time when I fasted or went hungry. If I wanted food, there was plenty in the pantry for me to munch on or some I could go pick up myself at the supermarket. A growling stomach is the worst I've ever had and it was more annoying than anything. That kind of privilege can distance one from all the work that goes into making the food they thoughtlessly consume, making the problem of keeping the entire world fed that much harder to solve.

To be entirely honest, I don't know where my food comes from. Not one bit of it. I can look on the boxes to see, but that doesn't really tell me anything about where the ingredients came from or how far it traveled to reach my pantry shelf. Maybe the chocolate in my brownies came from one of the cocoa farms the news will spotlight on occasion for its use of child labor and slavery? There's really no way for me or many other consumers to know without doing some very heavy research, especially when it's prepared/processed food like the foods that make up most of my diet.

Growing a biodiversity of foods may not have the strength of pesticides that get into our food and almost certainly leave behind residue we consume when we eat our large, waxy apples, but it is a solid form of pest control and needs to be in practice. It gives farmers a greater yield of a larger variety of foods, but it seems to be rejected because the agriculture industry wants massive yields of one crop, not large yields of three. Then they get grown year after year after year and the soil gets depleted even when the farmers are practicing ways to enrich the soil. It's all quite sad. Between history lessons about the evolution in farming that was three-field rotation/crop rotation and Silent Spring, it's all familiar to me.

Plus I have some personal experience with wasteful, lazy farming practices. I see miles and miles of empty cotton fields when I go to Georgia to see family. That land could be used to grow crops that can draw from the nutrients cotton doesn't use, but nope. If cotton isn't growing in the fields, nothing is. After cotton is harvested, the acres remain bare until it's time to plant the cotton again. 

I'm always in class when the food markets on campus happen, so I need to make a commitment to finding the off-campus farmer's markets and buying my produce from there, not the shelves of Target and Publix. My dollars should support the local farmers who (hopefully) use sustainable practices. It's my own laziness and determination to dedicate 100% to school that has me buying what's cheap and easy to find. Laziness doesn't make anyone healthy even when they're buying the healthiest of foods. Time to start looking up good farmer's markets in the area and find out when they happen. That's a good first step for me, along with becoming more aware of how much energy, water, and gas I'm wasting when I want to stay in the shower and sing just one more song.