Post 3: Environmental Impacts of My Meal

 For this post, I looked at the environmental impact of my meal. This included: Black beans mixed with brown rice, skinless rotisserie chicken, and plantain chips.

Environmental Impacts/produced

Black beans in the U.S. grocery stores usually come from the states like Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Nebraska. Outside the U.S., they might also come from Brazil. Black beans farming uses a lot of land, requiring irrigation. This can lead to strain on water supplies. However, the benefit of growing beans is that they add nitrogen back into the soil, helping soil health. 

Brown Rice is mostly grown in the south of the U.S.. You would find these grown specifically in Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. If we're talking outside the country, some might be imported from India, Vietnam, and Thailand. Rice farms need huge amounts of water, and flooded rice paddies cause methane to be released. This is a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. Since the farmland replaces natural habitats, it reduces biodiversity

Rotisserie Chicken mostly came from large poultry farms. You mostly find these farms in Alabama, North Carolina, or Arkansas, which are major chicken producers. Chicken farming requires the usage of fossil fuels for heating barns. If not managed well, it can also produce waste that pollutes the water. Crops to feed the chickens such as corn and soy, require fertilizers and pesticides. This affects soil and air quality.

Plantain Chips are imported from Costa Rica, Ecuador, or Columbia. This item is a major global producer. Plantain farming requires pesticides used in tropical agriculture. This can lead to soil erosion and deforestation.

Transportation/Distribution/Consumption Impacts

My meal most likely reached me by truck, since the gr
grocery store food in the U.S., travels through U.S. trucking routes. The imported plantain chips, most likely traveled by cargo chip, then later trucked to Wisconsin. So the ingredient that traveled the farthest would be the plantain chips. Which makes the most “local” item the chicken or beans, due to them often being U.S. grown. The waste is plastic packaging from the beans and chicken
, including the plantain chip bag. This waste will most likely end up in a landfill, where it takes decades to break down.
External Link: https://www.usda.gov/farming




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