Blog Post #3

To quickly refresh, the meal I described was a chicken stir-fry, and more than half of the ingredients came directly from my parent’s garden. From the grocery store we purchased chicken, rice, and an oriental-style of sauce. From the garden included carrots, peas, spinach, zucchini, parsley and basil.

To learn about the origins of the chicken and rice, I had to do a little research to figure out a general location. But coincidentally, for this posting, I literally know exactly where a large portion of my meal came from. My parents have been avid gardeners for my entire life, but when we moved to a 6-acre house in 2002, they really got a chance to grow plants on a pretty large scale. The vegetables of my meal all came from our garden and are pretty much as local as one can get, so transportation and distribution wasn’t necessary. Since we are growing food on such a small scale (compared to a major farm) I can happily say that the environmental effects were little to none. The largest resource used for our meals was water, but we are using it on such a small scale we don’t have to worry about depletion, just a high water bill (one that is counterbalanced by the money we saved by growing our own meals).

Now, while I am extremely proud of the first half of my post, this next section is going to be the opposite. By purchasing the chicken from a grocery store and eating it, I am single handedly adding fuel to the global warming fire. Unfortunately I don’t remember what brand of chicken we bought, but I have to assume it came from an industrial chicken farm. Chicken farms use an incredible amount of natural resources and fossil fuels because they have such an enormously large amount of customers to serve. Water is becoming a problem more and more, and a single chicken farm uses gallons upon gallons of water a day, creating a local problem that is a thread from a global crisis that is only going to get worse. Most chicken farms are also heated by propane. While propane releases high amounts of greenhouse gases, it is also a natural resource that we are bound to run out of, and the more chicken we eat the quicker it’ll drain away. To make things worse, the chicken was either flown or driven to our supermarket, a process that, when multiplied by all the deliveries from all the chicken farms in our nation, uses extremely large amounts of gasoline, which we know is actually oil. If all of this isn’t bad enough, they top off this gift by wrapping it in sheets of plastic and Styrofoam, two non-biodegradable materials that are known to be horrible for our environment.

While half of my meal may be environmentally friendly, half isn't, and I am well aware that the vast majority of the world doesn't have the luxury of a personal vegetable garden.