Reflection on Lecture Five- Food and Sustainability

With more people becoming richer and more affluent, they have higher demand and expectation on the food they are consuming. When people are rich or can afford to pay, they want to eat delicious and fabulous meal and not satisfied with just the plain and necessities. For example, people in American dislike eating vegetables and eat very little of it, not because it is hard to find vegetables in the United States, but simply because they find it almost tasteless and not nice to eat. The richer group wants to consume the best for every of their meals and here, only meat and perhaps the processed food are up to their standards. Furthermore, living standards are so good in the developed countries that they can have more time to spend on leisure than to work; and most of them like to spend most of the leisure time eating and socializing. Even when they socialize, much of it has got to do with food. For instance, there will be food at a party, group dinner, and bar. There will always be plenty of food everywhere, for everyone, and perhaps way too much. On average, a person in the United States consumes thirty times more than a person in India and this is ridiculous. Each person in the developed country is consuming way too much than what a person really requires. Ironically, the amount is too large that it is causing health problems for the rich people. Here in the developed countries, many are dying of over consuming; for instance many deaths are caused by diabetes and heart attack. On the other hand, many people in the poorer countries are dying of malnutrition. Shouldn’t it time for the developed countries to look at how much they are eating? It is too much for good. 

First, too much consumption of meat is bringing about environmental problems for the world. In order to meet the high demand of meat, large amount of land space is taken up for grazing activities. It is said that 25% of the Earth’s land is managed grazing, making it the biggest category of land use. Many regions are also faced with desertification as a result of over-grazing. 

 Desertification vulunerability

 Desertification

On top of that, three quarter of agricultural land is used for grazing, and a good 8% of total water use is allocated to grazing in order to provide the amount of meat demanded. Grazing also contributes much to the emission of greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide as mentioned in the previous lecture. As such, in order to produce more meet for consumption, it actually worsens the phenomenon of climate change. Furthermore, the Westerners have brought up the issue of overpopulation in regions like the sub Saharan Africa and India. However, it is very contradicting that so much land is taken up to produce the food they want. 

On top of that, many poor countries are facing problems meeting the basic needs of its people. People in those countries lack food, clean water, and amenities. If there is a more equal distribution of these basic needs, especially food and clean water to the people do not have access to it. For instance, an American can still live comfortably with twenty times less the amount he is consume now, and that twenty times of amount of food can meet the needs of twenty people in India. All in all, people in the rich countries are consuming too much of the Earth’s resources such that the other group of people is deprived of resources.

Furthermore, it is very appalling that rich countries are continuing to consume more resources to deal with the health problems that are caused by overeating. 

 Health issues with over-eating

They have to come up with better medical technologies to treat patients with food related health problems like diabetes and high blood pressure. There are also more issues with the consumption of meat with many new animal related diseases. This can be a result of high meat consumption. Farmers graze the animals with inappropriate conditions and methods to shorten the duration and cut down land space in order to produce more meat within a short period of time. This may affect the animals and in turn making it unsuitable for human consumption. Therefore, the best way to avoid and resolve all these problems is to eat lesser meat! This will definitely give out more land space to support a greater population and to grow the essential food such as rice and vegetables to cater to all.