Use Global Warming, Save the World

It’s not only spoken about, it’s in fact very much here and very much real.  Whether it’s a short-term cycle or a permanent change, the weather has changed for many people.  Record forest and bush fires on both sides of the equator, island populations made refugee by rising waters.  It’s not something you can stop by yourself; it is something we all need to put our own efforts towards stopping.  By myself, I won’t make a large dent; with you along, we will make a difference.

Think about some of the factors which cause global warming: pollution being one of the chief ones, pollution caused by our transportation and power generation.  One of the major creators of transport related pollution is the growing and transportation of foodstuffs.  At the farm level, where farm machinery chews fuel and spews pollutants, to the trucks which take the produce to warehouses, to the shipping out to supermarkets, and even to the family car transporting that food from the supermarket to the home.  

Then, of course, there’s the energy (and pollution) costs of cooking that food, decomposing the scraps, and carting those scraps to the garbage facility.  Have I touched on the energy costs of making and distributing the fertilisers and pesticides used to produce that food?  Or indeed the cost to the earth of having destroyed natural habitat to make way for those farms?  

You can see that it appears that having year-round tomatoes from your supermarket chain doesn’t seem to be all that much of a problem – until you unravel that thread all the way back.  Only then do you see the entire impact your ham cheese and tomato sandwich is having…  

And I want to stress – I don’t want you or myself to miss out on that HCT on rye, either. I do want to point out that you can make a huge difference in how you obtain it…  

So – what to do?

Put most simply, eat local.  

The tomatoes?  If they’re from a supermarket chain they probably have more frequent flyer miles than you do. Try a local farmer’s market, and better yet, try an organic food local farmer’s market. That way you know there wasn’t a load of pollution created to make fertilisers and pesticides, it was grown locally so it didn’t ride around the entire country first, and most important of all it will fresher and tastier than the supermarket tomato.