FI Assignment 2

This section of the book was littered with statistics and futuristic projections. While it was informative, it was extremely boring. One part I found interesting, though, was the small chapter called "Global Warming and Your Food," (page 119). This chapter gave very useful advice on how to shop in the supermarket in order to reduce your carbon footprint. For people who are not well informed on which foods have greater contributions to global warming, like me, this chapter gives a good outline of what to look for. I have been hearing for years that what I eat directly affects the planet, but I never understood how and I never took the initiative to find out.

Organic food is probably the most well-known option for reducing your carbon footprint when it comes to food consumption, but I never thought of the pesticides, growth hormones, and antibiotics as energy consuming. I only ever considered the idea that the factory farms themselves emit greenhouse gases. So I should eat organic to be good to the planet, but also to be good to my body. I knew that the more meat I ate, the larger my carbon footprint would be, so that section was nothing new. I have never thought about processed foods as being high in greenhouse gas emissions, but it makes sense that they are. The chapter even tells you how to look out for processed foods in order to distinguish them from other foods, which may seem like common sense, but it could be very helpful to explain those things to people who are really unfamiliar with the problems. Buying foods that have been transported from distant locations and foods that are heavily packaged are harmful to the environment for obvious reasons.

He displays this information as five questions you should ask yourself when you're buying food, and at the end of every description, he offers an alternative. These alternatives teach people how to shop in an environmentally friendly way, which will not solve the problem of global warming, but will motivate people to become more active in the prevention of this problem.