Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 234

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have," by Tatiana Schlossberg.



In fact, Americans eat so much corn—in the form of meat (the food our food eats), syrup, oils, and alcohol—that according to scientists, on a molecular level, Americans are basically “corn chips with legs.” But there’s also a lot of it we don’t eat, or at least not directly: just under forty percent is animal feed, and another thirty percent is used for ethanol. Of all that corn, we only eat about 1.5 percent of it in the form of actual corn (or popcorn or cereal.)

As it turns out, the emissions from transportation relative to the overall emissions associated with food production are very small. All transportation (including how farm equipment or other supplies got to the farm, for instance) is about 11 percent of the total, and final delivery (from producer to retail location) is about 4 percent. Generally speaking, the production of food accounts for much more of the emissions as well as the overall environmental impact. For beef, which, as we know, requires tremendous amounts of energy and resources to produce, only 6 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are from transportation (1 percent is food miles). For fruits and vegetables, transportation’s share is higher—about 18 percent—but still less than production. What does that tell us? It means that buying local doesn’t make that much of a difference to food’s overall impact. One study found that you could reduce your emissions by a maximum of 5 percent if you bought local. If, instead, you shifted one day’s consumption of red meat and dairy per week to another protein source or fruits and vegetables, you could achieve the same level of greenhouse gas reduction.