The True Cost of Chicken

I am not going to attempt to lie on my blog! It was only when I got to college that I started really thinking about my food choices and how they might affect the environment and how they actually came to be on my plate. When you are little you are kind of spoon fed with food and ideas about food that it takes a long time to realize, oh this is a cow, this comes from a tree or this took the hands of five migrant workers to pick. It was not until I was in high school and definitely in college that I really started to think about where my food was coming from. My major here is International Relations and my specialization is Africa, so I have always been pretty aware of how we (the United States) extract resources from Africa. Yet, it is to such a greater scale then this, and resources, including food put so much impact on the environment and especially the people who live there. We talked about this idea in class with ruined resources, ruined people. I truly believe that. However in the United States we still have the luxury of ignorance about where our food comes from. When we walk into any Safeway of Giant, all we see is beautiful colors, beautiful produce and money to be spent. Foods are packaged beautifully, making our lives easier. It was not until I studied abroad in South Africa that I was truly aware of the difference. While walking through a very poor, predominately black neighborhood on the outskirts of Cape Town called Langa, I saw a huge fire burning, and a strange smell coming from the fire. As I got closer and looked in the fire, I saw goat heads, being discarded and burned. When I kept walking past the meat station, I later saw goats and various other animals being slaughtered, skinned and gutted. These people cook and kill for themselves. The majority of Americans have never stepped inside a slaughter house, and the animal they are eating gets lost in the processing and packaging. I am not claiming to be a saint, this is definitely the case for me and I have been struggling with eating meat for a long time. I want to give it up so badly for ethical reasons, but I love meat so much and eat it at least once a day.

When I make food choices I think where is this food really coming from, and how much energy had to be spent to get this food in my hand, looking like this? I also try to think about how the animals were raised, if it is meat. I now realize how spoiled I am being an American, and living in a city. I do not have to kill my own food; I can walk into a market and get food that is pre-packaged, pre-cooked, pre anything! That is the one thing I wish everyone could realize. Even if you do not think daily about your environmental impacts and food choice, just at least acknowledge that we are so lucky. With vegetables and fruits in particular I think about pesticides and herbicides that may have been sprayed on them to keep critters off. Also, with wheat and basically everything else I eat I now think about hybrid crops, and wonder if everything I am truly eating is a product of hybridization.

Out of all the foods I had eaten last week, I think the one with the biggest environmental impact is probably my meat, of which I eat mostly chicken. I say this because the amount of energy it takes to raise and slaughter chickens, I think, is higher than what it might take to grow crops. They need food, water and shelter. I remember reading in my other environmental class that for each pound of meat produced it took something like three times as much grain to feed that animal. So in this way I think the raising of meat is really imbalanced. I think the raising of meat might have the highest environmental impact, and am excited to see what the true answer is in class.