What did you learn about dietary choices from using the footprint calculator? Now imagine that you could translate what you learned into an effective societal policy on food- what would it be? And how would this policy effect the need to alleviate world hunger?
925 million people on earth do not have enough to eat according to the FAO [Food and Agricultural Organization]. That's almost 1 in 7 inhabitants of our planet!
Food & Hunger >
Food and how it effects the earth
The production of food causes a lot of harm to the earth and farms release a lot of carbon into the air, which is bad for the environment
Many people actually don’t know that when growing food, the fruits and vegetables release greenhouse gases (C02 and Methane). That doesn’t even count for the farming, transportation, and disposing of the food. All of that adds up to quite a bit of different gases that heat up our atmosphere. Although we do need CO2 and Methane to keep our atmosphere the right temperature, too much does in fact add to global warming and climate change. A good way to help lower your carbon footprint is to monitor the food that you buy, eat, and dispose of.
An article by The Washington Post, “The Enormous Carbon Footprint of the Food that we Never Even Eat”, says, “ A massive amount of needlessly emitted carbon is poured into the atmosphere to produce unused food. These wasted carbon emissions could be prevented if we made sure that no more food was produced than was going to actually be used.” By cutting down on the amount of food being grown, we could easily start to cut down on Carbon Dioxide release and waste way less food.