Blog Post 3: Does our Food Kill?

     According to the UWM dining website, they get their food sustainably, but how true is this? In my previous blog post I described eating a meal that consisted of tomato basil soup, a grilled cheese sandwich, cucumbers, grapes, and a banana. For this post I will be going into detail on where the cheese of my grilled cheese was produced, as well as where they most likely get their bananas.

The cheese comes from the Wisconsin Cheese Company, but where do they get their cheese from? When looking at their website there is no mention of where they farm their dairy or where they get their cheese. Without being able to trace what exact farm this cheese specifically came from it makes it hard to know exactly where it was produced.

    Dairy might be delicious, but that deliciousness comes with a heavy price. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, milk production globally increased by 30 percent between 2005 and 2015 and was accompanied by a global dairy cow herd increase of 11 percent. Dairy is responsible for 2.9 percent of total human-induced greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, dairy production in intensive farming systems pollutes air and water and heavily contributes to soil degradation and deforestation. This graphic shows that in the last two years, greenhouse emissions increased by 11 percent. It also helps us visualize more on how damaging that is for our environment.



For the banana, the UWM website is not clear on where they get this specific fruit. Most bananas from a grocery store come from either South or Central America. According to an article by the University of Florida, “Main Suppliers of Fresh Bananas. The main suppliers of bananas to the US market are Guatemala, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Honduras.” What this tells us is that bananas are typically not grown in the United States, especially not in Wisconsin. This map does show that bananas can be grown in the US, but it is unlikely that UWM gets their bananas there


Getting bananas from another country has a toll on our environment. For starters, banana production needs land to grow. Since bananas have such a high demand, they have causes significant deforestation, especially in Costa Rica. Additionally, bananas use an above average amount of pesticides and nitrogen fertilizers. As a result, a significant amount of water must be used to clean up these pesticides. These pesticides can also seep into our natural water sources and can harm local wildlife.


 I got the banana and the cheese from the UWM dining hall. They likely got their bananas via refrigerated trailers known as reefers. Reefer trailers emit toxic gases, such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter. These gases harm our environment and cause serious health problems. The cheese probably traveled by a sealed tanker truck, which has its own environmental issues. These trucks emit even more carbon emissions because these trucks rely on petroleum-based fuel, usually diesel. These greenhouse gases lead to global warmer which impacts us globally. The bananas traveled farther to get to me, since they come from a whole other country. The cheese comes from Wisconsin, so I would consider that local. Both of these products lead to waste. The cheese was likely packaged in plastic, which does not naturally break down. This packaging can threaten wildlife and our ecosystems if not thrown away properly. The stickers on bananas are both recyclable and compostable, so they are less of a threat to our environment.




Here are all of the sources I used to get the data for this blog post. 

Comments

Post a Comment