As the first section of questions: "What, exactly, do you think about when you make food choices? Do you have environmental considerations in mind? Or other stuff?" I do keep nutrition in mind, yet; I'm also a college student with not a large income to spend money on fancy organic foods. I stay away from canned anything, yet; I do purchase frozen foods. I really wish that foods did have labels on them that said "Genetically modified" on them because it would probably reinforce my decisions or cause me not to purchase something. Whenever I buy meat I always purchase the brand that states it does not contain antibiotics or hormones, however; sometimes I'm skeptical about how much truth that holds. I would like the chance to blame my being Dutch-ness on my food purchases too. My roommates always ask me how much stuff I bought at the grocery and how much money I spent. They always do this because I have a tendency to buy only buy what is on sale or if I have a coupon for it.
The second part of this question asks: "Take a few moments to consider everything you've eaten in the last day or two. Of the food or beverage items you've consumed, which, in your estimation, has had the greatest environmental impact? Why?" I think the mini frozen pizza I ate for lunch today had a pretty large environmental impact. First, it consists of a plethora of inputs such as the dough, the sauce- which comes from tomatos, the peppers, mushrooms, and sausages. These inputs were either grown on a large scale farm somewhere that produces a large amount of waste, and the sausages came from a pig, which probably sat in a stall in an industrial farm without room to move and was forced to eat foods unnatural to him, such as the grain. Then these pizzas were put together in a large factory somewhere and frozen. These pizzas used energy to keep them frozen and also had to be transported in a truck that had a freezer to the grocery store. Then these pizzas had to remain frozen in the freezer there. Luckily i do not have a car so it did not cost any fossil fuel energy for me to transport myself to the store and back home with the pizza. From there the pizza went into my freezer until i had to heat the oven and let it bake there for 15 minutes. This pizza also came in a box and plastic wrapping- further pollution. And the cost of the pizza? $1.00. After analyzing that, i don't think i'm going to be buying those pizzas again.
Now for this weeks question: The corn challenge! I also failed at this, but I did always look at the ingredients of what i ate to take into consideration there was corn involved. One thing that surprised me was bread! Just yesterday i went grocery shopping and found a bread that claimed it did not contain "High fructose corn syrup" in it. I didn't know most breads have that! And to prove it I looked at some other brands and it was an ingredient! Another thing I noticed was the frequency of corn, soy and wheat being in our diet. If it wasn't corn, it was one of the other two, often times there was a combo of 2 or even all three. This brought me back to senior year of high school when I went on a field trip to the Chicago Stock Exchange. There traders were buying and selling corn, soy and wheat- the commodities exchange. This really brings it all together for me and shows that these three foods are driving the American diet.
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