Eating Green and Healthy

It is often believed that in order to be eco-friendly one needs to consume locally grown foods. Some even advocate this militantly, saying that it is not ‘natural’ to consume strawberries/cherries in the middle of winter, when it is evident that they would have had to travel miles from the Southern Hemisphere to get to their wintery destinations in the northern hemisphere. A new study titled ‘Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States‘ by Christopher Weber and Scott Matthews, both from Carnegie Mellon, forthcoming in the journal Environmental Science and Technology suggests that it is the production of the food (how it is produced) that matters more than its transportation (how far it travels). They find that transportation adds only 11% to the average household’s contribution to greenhouse gases (GHG) due to food consumption, the rest due to the food production itself. Of the remainder, the largest contributor of GHG was found to be Red meat (30%) and dairy (18%), with fruits and vegetables (11%) and cereals and grains (11%) contributing among the least. Chicken, fish and eggs contributed 10% towards GHGs. Another evidence of the fact that red meat is not healthy, whether to the health of an individual or our earth. A chapter in the S. Clark edited book ‘Food Politics at Home and Abroad‘ discusses the water usage in the production process of various types of foods. This chapter, written by Michael Ault and Monica Evans, titled ‘Verities of Vegetarianism: Why They Pay Less and We Pay More‘ finds that more water is needed to produce one pound of meat than for an equivalent pound of vegetables.