After reading this week’s learning resources, my perspective on meat consumption has changed significantly. My previous belief about meat consumption was that it was best to keep farming outdoors and “natural” rather than participate in the often-unethical farming of indoor livestock. I never realized that outdoor farming had as large of a negative environmental impact as Monbiot points out in… Read more »
In his book Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, Richard Robbins weighs the environmental costs of a staple of the US diet: beef. In mathematical number of calories, beef is an inefficient food that requires huge food input. Cattle feed accounts for 80% of US grain production and about half of US water consumption. This inefficiency is magnified as… Read more »
What I found interesting this week was the evolution of food systems, from it’s beginning to it’s present forms. The lifestyles of humans have evolved dramatically. In a hunter gatherer society, food was consumed as it was available, and groups would migrate to find more food resources once theirs become scarce. However, as these evolved into settlements and communities, humans began to deplete… Read more »
(large scale industrial livestock farm) The environmental impact of industrial livestock raising is huge. It is the second largest contributor to greenhouse gases behind energy production. Without changes in how we produce meat, the amount of greenhouse gas emitted through industrial livestock raising will only increase. The population is rising and becoming more affluent. More affluent populations tend to eat… Read more »
My research paper focused on finding a solution in mitigating the dependency on meat production in the global food production. The problem with animal agriculture is that it uses an enormous amount of our natural resources and creates a high level of greenhouse-gas emissions. Meat production uses a vast amount of water, crops and land. The animals being raised for food create a large amount of… Read more »
The political ecology of today’s world food system is continuously being shaped by countless influential factors. The world food system is in an utter state of imbalance in terms of waste and environmental degradation. The foundation from which these issues arise can be traced back to governmental and social dimensions and or decisions that took place in the recent past…. Read more »
Fossil fuels are everywhere, even in our food. As we learned in week 6, oil is used to power the heavy machinery used on industrialized farms, it is in the fertilizer in the form of petroleum, it is in the plastics that are used to neatly package our food, and it is used to power the planes, trains and automobiles… Read more »
It turns out that soil is way more beautiful than we think and is even linked to issues of veganism. I realized how little I think about soil and what it is composed of- in fact, I didn’t even know exactly what soil is. It was just something that I took for granted. Thus, it was interesting in the lecture… Read more »
To function effectively, landscape governance ought to consider the whole system, which would account for the ecological impact and food sustenance needs. There is much profit to be found in land. Cash crops offer huge profits that are motivating a change in land investment and moving large corporations into the field where small farmers once predominated. The farms then tend… Read more »
The ancient wisdom presented by Anupam Mishra his TED Talk showcased a number of things. Not least of those is the contrast in thinking between the time tested solutions that still work, that were designed and built on the foundation of community, and the money grubbing greed that compels Ivy league institutions and other universities to “invest” in African farmland…. Read more »