What to eat?

When it came to looking at all the food that I have eaten over the weekend a lot of it was process and probably had some environmental impact. For the last two days I was at a track meet and ate foods that I associated with being at a track meet. This means my meals consisted of a lot of bagels, bananas, power bars (Luna and Soy Joy), PowerAde, water, and pasta dishes.

All of these foods have caused some type of environmental impact. For example the banana, it most likely did not come from the United States, but somewhere in South America, where it had to be shipped or flown in to the supermarket where I purchased it. The flyer miles that my bananas racked up probably have more than exceed the amount of miles I will fly this entire year. Plus there is the refrigeration that has to be accounted for. Bananas have to be kept at a certain temperature while traveling so they can arrive in the supermarket fresh, I cannot imagine how much energy must be used to just keep the bananas refrigerated.

Moving on from bananas and to my power bars, bagels, PowerAde all of this product include some form of corn or soy product. Soy and corn both dominate a vast amount of agriculture space and has lead to environmental degradation in large amounts of the Mid West. As large corn and soy farms are often monocultures that destroy the local ecology of the area. These farms also require a great amount of pesticides, fertilizers, and water. The first two find themselves in waterways and makes their way down into rivers creating dead zones.

My pasta dishes also probably had some corn in it. I had both of them at an Italian restaurant and can only assume that the meal was not entire cooked in the restaurant but instead made somewhere else and simply heated up and served to me. All the ingredients had to get assembled somewhere probably a good distances away, before making it to the restaurant, so like the banana my pasta dishes had to have racked up some flyer miles.

This is just looking at the environmental impact that my food had and not at the fact that everything was wrapped in plastic that was for the most part thrown out, because it had food on it was, non recyclable. The only things that did not get thrown out were the PowerAde bottles, because I can use them multiple times as water bottles.

After looking at this blog I realized that most of my choices when it came to choosing food over the weekend were based off of what was convenient and familiar to me. Think about the environment and what role my food had on it did not even cross my mind. But if I had to guess if I went to the exact same places and tried to eat with as little environmental impact, I am not sure I much I would be able to eat over the weekend, considering I was away.