How Our Food Choices Affect the Weather

The fact that it is snowing here in Seattle on the first day of April has me feeling a little out of sorts. This is a city that rarely sees much snow at all, especially not after the month of January. And yet here it is, coming down rapidly.

My mother, who lives in northern New Mexico told me it snowed there last week, a day after the temperature reached 87 °F.

This has gotten me thinking about climate change and the food connection. So I'm looking at how my food choices affect these things.

According to an article by Paul Roberts in the April 2009 issue of Mother Jones magazine, the amount of energy used to produce our food has increased dramatically.

"In 1940, one calorie of energy produced two to three calories of food. Today, it takes 10 calories of energy to produce each calorie of food sold at supermarkets," Roberts states.

Just as with any other business, farming requires burning fossil fuels to make fertilizer, run tractors and process and transport food.

Roberts also notes that Americans spend less than 10 cents of every dollar on food, which is the least in the world. Americans also eat more meat than anyone else in the world — 200 lbs. per year.

Beef production, alone, is a huge drain (literally) on our dwindling water supply. "It takes nearly one gallon of fossil fuel and 5,200 gallons of water to produce just one pound of conventionally fed beef," according to Mother Jones magazine.

"If every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetables and grains, for example, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads. And speaking of cars, it takes fuel to transport food, so buying from local farmers and ranchers cuts emissions even if you don’t cut out any meat," according to an article on the Environmental Defense Fund website, which cites a recent study from the University of Chicago.

So what can you do? Plant a garden, cut down on your meat consumption and buy as local as possible. Local Harvest is a wonderful resource for finding farmers' markets, family farms, and other sources of sustainably grown food and grass-fed meats in your area.