by teddlesruss dat who

Created on: September 06, 2009

Do you feel that you're a carbon disaster? Do you think you have room to reduce your footprint on the world? Do you wish this summer wasn't hotter than any preceding summer and wish fervently that you could help stop the world from burning to a crisp with you and me and everyone and everything else on it?

If you're not thinking about that, then maybe it's time you did. And one of the most hidden and non-obvious sources of your carbon footprint involves the food you consume. So much energy is used, so much pollution produced, so much damage done to the planet, by this one factor. And to top that off, one quarter of us (the ones reading this) in the developed world probably account for more than half of the food production of the world, and possibly as high as 90% of food-related pollution of the world.

Adopt a cynical attitude to what's visually evident on packaging. Just excessive packaging itself adds tremendously to your carbon footprint. Then too, what the manufacturer places so that it won't catch your eye is the stuff they don't want you to see, and therefore deserves a careful checking-out.

Is this made with chemicals and additives? They had to be manufactured too. Is this an over-processed product? All that processing cost energy, making the energy caused pollution.

How was this food primarily produced? Was it monstrosities like huge chicken farms, where the chickens were bred up using hormones and antibiotics? (Which of course had to be manufactured, and which then leach out of the chicken waste into the water and affect plant and animal life for miles around the factory). A similarly horrifying intensive piggery?

Or perhaps grown on a factory farm producing a single monoculture of crop at megaton rates, leading to a concentration of opportunistic pests, a reduction in the number of naturally occurring species, and a dependence on chemicals which leave their imprint as far away as the deepest parts of the oceans?

Now ask yourself the last question: Do I really need this hyper-processed material which was once foodstuff but is now mostly chemicals to offset the effects of other chemicals? This food that is packaged in a series of plastic blister convenience packs held within a plastic outer which is inside a four-colour printed cardboard box which is sealed with another layer of plastic and which was contained along with 24 like it in a four-colour printed cardboard carton placed on a pallet and wrapped with plastic pallet wrap and then shipped here from halfway around the world?

'That' is what you can do to reduce your carbon footprint, you see. Food manufacturers adopt these practices because they work. To the food manufacturer, their definition of works is 'not' that it produces happy, healthy customers and workers. To them, the definition of it works is equal to it sells well, a lot of people buy it, and we produce it for a whole 75c a tonne cheaper than we produced the old one, so our profits on this line are going to be $750,000 larger this year.

And what exactly is it that I'm proposing that you do to reduce the amount of pollution you allow manufacturers and producers to spew out so that you can have you bowl of Bacon Flavoured Mega Krunch Multi-Vitamin Muesli in the morning? Well, that's really up to you, isn't it?

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