Field To Fork: The Story Of Food Miles
By Joshua Rosenthal, M.S.
Filed Under Green Living, The Big Picture | 2 Comments
Personal food choices have an impact on our bodies and on our environment. Every single meal we eat is made up of food that requires significant amounts of energy to reach our plate. The journey our food takes is much longer than most realize. We refer to this journey as food miles - the distance food travels from field to plate. The higher the mileage, the less cool the food.
Food travels further these days because large corporate grocery stores have centralized methods for distributing food. In some cases, a crop of cherries may travel across the country to be packaged and then sent back close to where the cherries were originally grown. In other situations, stores fly in food from all over the world to ensure they have fresh produce, whatever the season. This practice causes us to have organic bananas from Peru, kiwis from New Zealand, and avocados from Mexico at any time of year.
In my own area, my food coop sells organic apples from Washington State right next to apples grown locally and they both cost about the same. Locally produced, seasonal foods cut energy use and therefore leave a smaller impact. They are much much better for the environment and for local economies.
Then there’s the matter of meat. To eat or not to eat, that is the question. Cattle require huge amounts of water. Giving up just two pounds of beef a year will save more water than if you stopped showering for a year. When is Al Gore going to start talking about this? Continue reading Field To Fork: The Story Of Food Miles…
Posted on June 3, 2008 |
Chris Jordan And The Art Of Consumerism
By Anne O'Loughlin
Filed Under Arts & Culture | Leave a Comment
Chris Jordan, an accomplished nature photographer, has now taken America’s consumption habits to heart. He’s shocked US audiences with Running the Numbers: An American Self Portrait, a creative statistical view of how much trash is actually piling up in the United States. He uses the objects which people consume massive quantities of and photographs them en masse in an artful way. This play on Seurat’s famous Sunday In The Park actually represents the 106,000 aluminum cans Americans go through every 30 seconds.
Running the Numbers, completed in 2007, is a series of photographic and digital representations of over-the-top consumer culture which brings some already despairing statistics to light. The photographs are huge zoomed out shots of garbage, such as the piece below depicting 2 million plastic beverage bottles, which Chris informs us is the number used in the US every five minutes! 
Chris describes the inspiration for his work eloquently,”The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.” There are so many more incredible pieces in Chris’s portfolio, you just really have to check it out for yourself. Continue reading Chris Jordan And The Art Of Consumerism…
Posted on June 2, 2008 |
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