Blog Post #4

I am happy to say that a large majority of my meal was what you may consider “part of the solution”. While the stir-fry I ate contained chicken, this wasn’t a vital part of the meal, and it could have easily been just as sufficient without it. All of the vegetables and most of the spices included in the dish were directly out of my parent’s personal garden, and as I discussed in the last entry, we use very little resources to grow our crops—especially when considering to the amount of environmental impacts most store-bought meals have.

On a global scale, this tactic of eating (producing your own food) is very difficult in many regions. Luckily Wisconsin usually has fertile soil to grow in, we get plenty of rain, our summers are filled with sunny days as well, and most importantly, we have a lot of flat, open space. While there may not be as much space, it is still important to promote personal gardens as much as we can. In a city there may not be any public or rentable growing land, but that doesn’t mean somebody can’t set up a few raised garden boxes on the roof of their building or on their balcony.

Another way to discourage harmful food industries is to raise awareness about the drawbacks of fast-food restaurants and other small chain establishments. If we can stop people from constantly gorging on McDonalds and such we will both forcefully slow down the greenhouse levels of mass-food producers and raise the overall health of our country.

On a micro-scale in our own home, we are able to eliminate the use of so many resources by planting and eating from out own garden. For one, our plastic usage dramatically drops. If one really thinks about it, even fresh produce at a store uses significant amount of plastic. Each vegetable or fruit is usually dropped into its own separate bag, which is then put into a bigger plastic bag when you are checking out.

From my point of view, there are two major limitations of having your own personal garden. The first is space. If you simply don’t have any means for a large enough plot of land to grow a significant amount of crops on, you will probably have to resort to buying from somebody who does at a farmer’s market, or something of that nature. This may be a little bit more expensive, but will still save you from using many resources. The other limitation is know-how. Gardening isn’t easy, and it takes study and practice. Everybody can grow plants, but everybody also has to learn how. One must be diligent in watering every day, protecting the crops from animals, providing each crop with enough sunlight, and keeping the soil healthy. Though tough to manage, one will find the rewards are worth the work.

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.

Blog Post #2: The Meal

Now, being a poor college student, I generally don’t eat any meals that consist of many parts, so I’ll backtrack a week to when I was last visiting my parents. They live on 6 acres and use a good portion of it for extensive gardening, and they try to eat what they grow as much as possible. Last week we had a chicken stir-fry, and about half the ingredients were straight from our garden. In the store we bought rice, chicken, some type of oriental sauce, and from the garden we had spinach, peas, small carrots, fresh basil and parsley, and zucchini. Unlike many people, my favorite foods are fruits and vegetables, and I strive to eat as healthy as I can. Unfortunately eating both healthy and cheap is pretty difficult to do in our society. Most people are forced to buy inexpensive food just so they can feed their families. I look at the rising obesity levels around America, and I can’t help but link that with the growing gap between the upper and middle/lower classes. My parents always fed me healthy food when I was a child, and I am sure that has had a huge, positive effect on my dietary choices as an adult. Fortunately for me I don’t have to spend much money on fresh produce, seeing how my parents have such a great garden