Is My Meal a Possible Solution?

 

Is my meal a possible solution to environmental impacts associated with consumption?

The chicken in my meal was raised by a company that based their business on leaving a small carbon footprint. If the other mass chicken producers would do the same, there would be less water used in production and feed would be grown in the same areas that the chickens are grown. While the Tecumseh Chicken Company still uses water and burns some fossil fuels, they are aware of these things. They make decisions based on how the environment will be affected. If all companies did these things we would be facing many less negative impacts on our precious ecosystem.

The green beans and tomatoes in my meal were locally grown. One at a local farm, and one in my back yard. If more meals were made with local ingredients, there would be almost no carbon footprint associated with them. There would be no soil, air, or water pollution problems associated with consumption if this were the case.

The quinoa, on the other hand, wasn’t good for the environment, at all. While it has a low glycemic value, and is good for me, nutrition wise, it wasn’t a good decision for the environment. Both locally and globally, transporting ingredients from a continent away are not sustainable. Many fossil fuels were burned to get that quinoa from South America to Milwaukee.

Although the chicken had packaging that had to be thrown away, the meal didn’t really contribute that much to the amount of garbage that we put out every Sunday night. Veggie leftovers were composted, and therefore added to the nutrient content in my garden’s soil.

The limitations of the meal that I had were that not everyone has time to go to the farmer’s market or to grow veggies in their garden. This is very unfortunate because those who don’t have the time will spend more time, money and energy eating at restaurants or shopping at “big box” stores, so they can get everything at once. Another limitation is that Smart Chicken is expensive, and it may be difficult for everyone to be able to afford to buy it compared to mass produced, factory farmed chicken. 

There are some good things about my meal, and some bad things, when thinking about it environmentally. I think that the best answer would be to grow and store more food at home. If we all reduced our "outside" consumption, even by a little bit, we would make great positive changes locally and globally.

 

The Environmental Impacts of My Meal

Was my delicious dinner worth it?

What was my dinner composed of?

·        

•        Smart Chicken Leg Quarters

•        Steamed Green Beans

•        Grape Tomatoes

•        Quinoa Pilaf – quinoa, black lentils, corn, onions, bell peppers, and garlic

•         Coke Zero

•         Peanut Butter Cup Custard

Smart Chicken is from a company called, Tecumseh Chicken, which is located in Waverly, Nebraska. Tecumseh Chicken was founded on the idea of raising delicious chicken using sustainable practices and making sure to preserve natural resources. They chose their Midwest location based on how close it would be to the main feed ingredients for chicken: corn and soybeans. This was an environmentally good decision, because, “It takes much less non-renewable resources to transport packaged chicken than it does grain.” (Tecumseh Chicken) The carbon footprint of this chicken farm is drastically reduced because the grain-feed doesn’t have to travel far to feed these chickens. They are located in the center of the country and on Interstate 8. Although this location helps to make their carbon footprint smaller than the big, industrial chicken farms in this country, by allowing them to serve many locations with the least aggregate travel; they still burn gasoline and use Freon in their refrigerated trucks to deliver their product. They purposely located above the Ogallala aquifer and they aren’t near any surface water, so their operation poses no threat or risk to any water resource. 

Here is an informative video about Smart Chicken:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w06T2...eature=related

 The green beans that I served at this meal were from a local farmer’s market. They were grown within 20 miles of the market and were driven there by the farmer. It seemed like a small operation, but I don’t know anything about the practices of this farmer. The beans were really crisp and tasty and I saw a bug on them before I rinsed and steamed them, so I assume that pesticides weren’t used.

I grew the grape tomatoes in my own backyard. They were mostly watered with rain water that was collected in my barrels. I know that there were no pesticides used in my garden. Composted vegetable waste is frequently mixed into my soil, so I also don’t use any commercial fertilizers. Picking them and walking them to my dinner table wasted no fossil fuels and posed no environmental threats.

The quinoa that I used to make the pilaf was purchased, in bulk, at the Outpost, which is about one mile from my house. According to an NPR article, “…almost no farmers outside of the arid mountains and coastal valleys of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile grow it.” So, probably and unfortunately, this quinoa had to travel a great distance to make it into my dinner. Many fossil fuels were burned to bring this seed such a long way. I also had to steam it for about 40 minutes, or so, on my natural gas stove.

The Coca-Cola Company is based in Atlanta, Georgia, but my can was probably produced at the bottling plant located in Brown Deer, WI.

Culver’s uses eggs and dairy from over 60 Wisconsin farms. So, while I only had to drive a few miles to the closest Culver's, their custard ingredients come in from all over Wisconsin.

All of the ingredients in my dinner came to me by way of truck, restaurant, Co-op, farmer’s market, or my backyard. I am unsure of where the quinoa was grown, but I can guess that it was from South America, making it the ingredient that traveled the furthest to get to me. I would consider the green beans and the grape tomatoes “local” because one was from a farm that was close by, and one was from my backyard.  The chicken came in plastic packaging that will end up in a landfill and the quinoa came in a plastic bag that I reused. The cola and the custard came in recyclable containers that were taken by the recycling truck, and thankfully, the other items had no packaging.

 

 

 

End of Summer Dinner at My House

Dinner

A few days ago I made a nice dinner for my family and I. I started with some Smart Chicken Leg Quarters. I put sea salt, black pepper and paprika on them, and baked them in the oven. For a vegetable side dish, we had steamed green beans, and a big bowl of ripe grape tomatoes. Another side dish was Quinoa Pilaf, made with steamed quinoa, black lentils, corn, sautéed onions, yellow bell peppers, garlic and celery. This would have been a very healthy meal made with all organic or local ingredients, but I decided to have a Coke Zero with it, and then for dessert I had some Peanut Butter Cup Custard from Culvers.       

 

•   Smart Chicken Leg Quarters were purchased from The Outpost Natural Foods in Bay View. When I saw them  on sale (at $2.79/lb.), I bought two packages, cooked  one and put the other in the freezer.

•  The sea salt was, Eden Sea Salt, from France. (a gift from my sister)

•  The black pepper and paprika were from Penzey’s in Waukesha.

•  The green beans were from a local farmer’s market and they were perfect, crisp and tasty.

• The grape tomatoes were from my own garden. It was towards the end of the season, but they were still quite good.

•  I bought the quinoa, in bulk, at the Outpost. It was just the gold colored quinoa, and not a mixture of black, red, and gold.

• The lentils were Westbrae Natural Organic Black Lentils from the Outpost. (They were on sale, and I thought that they would be great in the pilaf, and I was right.)

• The corn was a frozen bag from Cascadian Farms, also from the Outpost, as well as the onion, bell pepper, garlic, and celery.

Thinking Geographically About Plastic Grocery Bags

         Seemingly flimsy, but practically indestructible plastic grocery bags are a hot topic. After watching "Battle of the Bag" and learning some of the ways that these common bags cause different kinds of harm, I will not be casually forgetting my reusable grocery bag anytime soon. Until viewing the informative documentary, I had never heard of the mosquito and Malaria problems in Nigeria that are directly related to plastic bag pollution. When it rains, the many bags that litter the area fill with water creating a mosquito’s perfect breeding grounds with thousands of little pools of stagnant water. When thinking of plastic pollution, I normally think of wildlife ingesting them or birds getting stuck in them, but now I know there are other implications as well.

The bag problem can be dealt with by force, like in India, where it is illegal to have plastic bags that aren't a certain thickness. They have a special task force that checks the local markets for the contraband, confiscates them and fines the guilty merchants. The issue can also be approached with education, like the environmental spokesperson in England who educated the merchants in her town by showing them the video that she made in Hawaii. They saw some of the environmental effects of the plastic bags, and voluntarily decided not to use them anymore. They spread the word throughout the city and encouraged people to carry their own bags to the store.

I think that if we start locally, and educate consumers about how the bags are affecting the planet negatively and in different ways it will catch on like it did in the small British town. Being encouraging and little by little changing our wasteful behaviors will spread and inspire other communities to do the same, and thereby become a global solution. The video made it clear that it’s obvious that the problem is much larger than just cleaning up the yard or taking out the trash, and that even if we stop using the plastic bags, we will be dealing with this problem for a long time.

When the bag promoter/manufacturer said that plastic bags are misunderstood, he was grasping for any reason that his big business shouldn't go under. He said that they can be reused, and we should celebrate their strength, but what he doesn't understand is that they cannot be reused over and over again for as long as the plastic is still strong. People use them to pick up after their dogs or to clean their cat’s litter boxes, but we really shouldn't be sealing that waste in a bag that won’t biodegrade for many years, and I doubt that people are emptying those bags and reusing them again for something else. The manufacturer wants to stay in business and not admit that plastic bags, made out of fossil fuels, are bad for the environment. I would say that the bags are not misunderstood, but rather he refuses to understand.