Such connections may help you develop a deeper appreciation for your food. Personally, I feel more satisfied and mindful when I have a connection to the food that I eat. Just like using a favorite family recipe, enjoying local food can evoke positive emotions and boost your spirits. Purchasing food directly from farmers and purveyors gives you the opportunity to learn more about farming practices and develop connections to your food.
If you want to eat local foods, check out farmers markets, co-ops, or farm-to-table restaurants in your area. It also has a host of positive economic, social, and environmental effects. Local foods tend to taste fresher, have more nutrients, and use less packaging. Supporting local food businesses leads to strong local economies. If you're looking to reduce your carbon footprint and combat climate change, diet and lifestyle choices can be a great place to start.
Here are 9…. In you can look forward to a huge shift in the food industry. Here are the 10 top food and nutrition trends expected in Clean eating focuses on consuming whole, minimally processed foods. Here are 24 clean eating tips that can improve your health and energy levels.
For many people, one of the best parts about traveling is getting to explore the local cuisines. This article looks at 10 of the healthiest cuisines…. This is a detailed article about sugar alcohols and their health effects.
They have several health benefits but can also cause digestive problems. Phenylalanine is an amino acid that your body uses to make important molecules. This article reviews phenylalanine benefits, side effects, and sources. Getting your meals delivered can save major time on meal prep. Numerous foods are marketed as healthy but contain hidden ingredients. Here are 14 "health foods" that aren't as nutritious as you thought. If you're considering adding or removing meat from your diet, you may wonder whether meat is healthy.
This article explores the environmental and…. For optimal health, it's a good idea to choose the foods that contain the most nutrients.
Here are the 11 most nutrient-dense foods on earth. In the United Kingdom, reports Tara Garnett of the Food Climate Research Network, "on the whole, organizations supporting local are now less likely to put numbers on things. For some in the agricultural community, promoting and eating "local Iowa food" is almost a kind of food patriotism, aimed at counteracting the forces of globalization that have put the state's family farmers at risk.
All of those are perfectly valid ways of thinking about local. But they don't have all that much to do with environmental costs and benefits.
But they're not a very good measure of the food's environmental impact. For example, trains are 10 times more efficient at moving freight, ton for ton, than trucks are.
So you could eat potatoes trucked in from miles away, or potatoes shipped by rail from1,miles away, and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with their transport from farm to table would be roughly the same. The environmental impact of food also depends on how it is grown.
Swedish researcher Annika Carlsson-Kanyama led a study that found it was better, from a greenhouse-gas perspective, for Swedes to buy Spanish tomatoes than Swedish tomatoes, because the Spanish tomatoes were grown in open fields while the local ones were grown in fossil-fuel-heated greenhouses. That seems obvious, but there are subtler issues at play as well. For example, Spain has plenty of the warmth and sunshine that tomatoes crave, but its main horticultural region is relatively arid and is likely to become more drought-prone in the future as a result of global climate change.
What if water shortages require Spanish growers to install energy-intensive irrigation systems? And what if greenhouses in northern Europe were heated with renewable energy? Perhaps it's inevitable that we consumers gravitate to a focus on food miles - the concept represents the last step before food arrives on our tables, the part of the agricultural supply chain that's most visible to us.
And indeed, all other things being equal, it's better to purchase something grown locally than the same thing grown far away. But a broader, more comprehensive picture of all the trade offs in the food system requires tracking greenhouse gas emissions through all phases of a food's production, transport, and consumption. And life-cycle analysis LCA , a research method that provides precisely this "cradle-to-grave" perspective, reveals that food miles represent a relatively small slice of the greenhouse-gas pie.
In a paper published last year, Christopher Weber and H. According to their calculations, final delivery from producer or processor to the point of retail sale accounts for only 4 percent of the U.
Final delivery accounts for only about a quarter of the total miles, and 40 percent of the transport-related emissions, in the food supply chain as a whole. That's because there are also "upstream" miles and emissions associated with things like transport of fertilizer, pesticides, and animal feed. Overall, transport accounts for about 11 percent of the food system's emissions. By contrast,Weber and Matthews found, agricultural production accounts for the bulk of the food system's greenhouse gas emissions: 83 percent of emissions occur before food even leaves the farm gate.
A recent life-cycle analysis of the U. In her study, transport accounted for about a tenth of the food system's greenhouse gas emissions, and agricultural production accounted for half. Garnett says the same general patterns likely also hold for Europe as a whole. There's Something about Dairy The other clear result that emerges from these analyses is that what you eat matters at least as much as how far it travels, and agriculture's overwhelming "hot spots" are red meat and dairy production.
In part that's due to the inefficiency of eating higher up on the food chain-it takes more energy, and generates more emissions, to grow grain, feed it to cows, and produce meat or dairy products for human consumption, than to feed grain to humans directly. But a large portion of emissions associated with meat and dairy production take the form of methane and nitrous oxide, greenhouse gases that are respectively 23 and times as potent as carbon dioxide.
Methane is produced by ruminant animals cows, goats, sheep, and the like as a byproduct of digestion, and is also released by the breakdown of all types of animal manure. Nitrous oxide also comes from the breakdown of manure as well as the production and breakdown of fertilizers.
In Garnett's study, meat and dairy accounted for half of the U. In fact, she writes, "the major contribution made by agriculture itself reflects the GHG [greenhouse gas] intensity of livestock rearing.
In their study the second-largest contributor to emissions was the dairy industry. Nor are these two studies unique in their findings. A group of Swedish researchers has calculated that meat and dairy contribute 58 percent of the total food emissions from a typical Swedish diet. At a global level, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that livestock account for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions-more even than all forms of fossil fuel-based transport combined.
The moment a piece of produce is picked or cut, its enzymes begin decomposing and feeding on precious nutrients. Researchers at Montclair State University revealed that the vitamin C content of broccoli was cut in half when it was shipped from out of the country compared to when it was sourced locally. Local produce vine-ripens naturally to build even more nutrients.
Since harvesting and traveling long distances can be a stressful, damaging adventure for your favorite fruit or veg, most non-local produce is picked before it is fully ripe so it can survive the trip to the grocery store. This may be great for business, but when a plant is allowed to linger on the vine and fully ripen before being harvested, its nutrient content is higher.
Local produce offers more nutrient variety, too. When eating closer to home, you gain access to a more diverse selection of produce because more nutrient-rich varieties that may not be hardy enough for transportation or popular enough for mass markets are available locally. Think: Local red leaf lettuce instead of iceberg or a locally-grown purple fingerling potato versus a russet potato.
The broader your diet, the more nutrients you consume. Many although not all small-scale, local farms nourish plants with cover crops and other sustainable methods that put nutrients back in the soil. Allowing the fruits and veggies to grow at their own pace with abundant natural nutrients enables their roots to dive deeper into the earth, increasing the nutrients the food pulls from the soil.
0コメント