FOOD CHOICES AND HEALING THE PLANET
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What are some ways that people can help heal the planet through their food choices?
III. Main Body
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Abstract
Being a vegetarian or eating vegan and healthier diets are some of the suggested options for correcting the current diet’s environmental impact. This paper will show that it is possible to identify proper diets that have reduced the environmental impact that is similar to the present diet. Such diets are consistent with the commonly available foods and are adequate. The research method for collecting data is on linear programming for finding solutions that are very close to the current diet. Data has collected from women aged between 31 to 50 years who at first lacked any food group constraints but were later to experience the constraints of dairy, fish meat, and eggs. I will also use a similar technique in searching for a closet diet hat have the same environmental reductions as its most restricted option (meaning that there is no intake of eggs, dairy, fish or meat) with no restrictions on products. There was the need to incorporate food products that are popular in designing a menu that is feasible for the American population to attain a logarithm optimization,
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Introduction
Background
There is the need for sustainable diets due to the increase of population growth meaning that there is a high level of food consumption. High demand is mainly in animal protein, yet the production of such food have an adverse impact on water, land, GHG emissions, fisheries, and animal welfare and biodiversity. High level of animal protein food also undermines the natural resources resilience in the process of food productions and undertakes the security of food for the future generations. It means that the food system has strong links to some of the most pressing challenges that we are experiencing today. For instance, the food system contributes to about 30% of the world climate by changing the emissions of greenhouse gasses (GHG) which is the main driver of biodiversity loss and deforestation. The food system is also a major user as well as a polluter of water resources that is now becoming increasingly scarce. Furthermore, overfishing has contributed to the death of essential fish stock which poses more threats to the marine ecosystem stability (Garnett et al., 2015).
Additionally, livestock is one of the greatest users of land all over the globe. Almost 80% of all agricultural land is for livestock feed production and grazing. 20% of this rangeland and pastures are degraded mostly due to over-grazing. Additionally, livestock consumes almost 8% of global water. The biodiversity impact through water pollution, land degradation and reduced biodiversity for agricultural purposes. Livestock contributes to a high proportional level of agricultural emissions of GHG (FAO, 2009).
The global per capita consumption of fish since the 1960s to 2012 has increased from 9.9 kilos to 19.2. This high demand for fish also means that there is a global overfishing of almost 29% in which 61% of full fishing. Each of the fish species is ten which account for twenty-four percent of fish production (FAO, 2014). Diets that have a low environmental impact do contribute to nutrition and food security as well as enabling the present and future generations to live a healthy life. Also, sustainable diets are respectful and protective of the ecosystem and biodiversity. These are diets which are culturally acceptable, affordable, economically fair, and are nutritionally adequate. The sustainable diets are also healthy and safe, and they do help in optimizing human and natural resources (Burlingame et al., 2012). Thus, the main characteristics of sustainable diets are that they are healthy, use less land intensity and produce low GHG. Thus, they do not lead to adverse impacts on biodiversity and Water (Garnett et al., 2015). Thus, there is the need to consider how food production has to be sustainable to cater for the rapidly increasing population of the world. The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) recommends that agricultural production has to be increased to almost 70% by the year 2050 to cater to the needs of the population (FAO, 2011).
Thus, the main question is how to decrease our current food system impact on environment degradation. One way is through the supply side improvements and the second one changes in food choices, demand and food products. FAO (2010) indicates that when crop production is done in a sustainable and most intensified manner together with the implementation of practices and technologies that reduce livestock production emissions (Gerber et al., 2013). Such activities have a huge potential as can be shown from the differences in GHG emissions from dairy production worldwide (Hagemann ET al.2012). A change in eating patterns and healthier food choices can be some direct options on the demand side. The focus of this paper is to determine how food choices and change in eating pattern and help the food system in lowering its environmental impact.
Objective
This paper will analyze some of the environmental impacts of some scenarios. We start by looking at the present average diet of American women aged from 31 to 50. And analyze a closer healthier diet to fit their eating habit that has all the nutritional requirements. However we acknowledge that eating healthier does not simply guarantee the existence of an environmentally friendly diet. We also analyze other predefined dietary interventions with three different types of animal products that exclude eggs and dairy. The final stage will be to compare these scenarios changes and providing optimal solutions as calculated by the LP after establishing restrictions on diets that have negative environmental impact. We use the target that can be attained maximally in each scenario on food product restrictions. From the analysis, we will have a good impression in understanding the food patterns that are not healthy as well as those with a low impact on the environment. Furthermore, diet patterns do remain close as possible to the current diet average
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Action Plan