News | The Green Foodprint

Yesterday, the San Francisco Chronicle’s excellent reporter Carolyn Lochhead published an article on genetically engineered food crops (GE, also called GMO for genetically modified organism). She pointed out that GMOs have been linked to human diseases and environmental damage, including catastrophic losses of monarch butterflies. It’s gotten so bad, she writes, that even the food manufacturers are worried that the latest “improvements” to corn planted for biofuel might ruin their own GMO crops!

Did you know that Dow wants to start selling a corn variety bred to be resistant to a pesticide that contains an Agent Orange chemical? In case you’re too young to remember the Viet Nam War, Agent Orange was sprayed widely over that country to kill its rainforests, to make its soldiers easier to target. Besides inflicting unthinkable environmental damage, Agent Orange harmed many Vietnamese and Americans.

The chemical (2,4-D) has been implicated in cancer, Parkinson’s disease, liver disease, reduced sperm counts, endocrine (hormone) disruption, and damage to nerves and the immune system. Its makers hope growers will buy tons of it and spray it on their crops to keep bugs away. I don’t want it used to produce my food. Do you? Personally, I’d rather eat a bug.

Besides, bugs evolve (whether creationists like it or not) and have become resistant to pesticides, so more and stronger pesticides are applied, creating the well-known “pesticide treadmill” that farmers can’t escape once they’re on it. One expert quoted by Lochhead calls it “a chemical arms race.” Fortunately, lots of people are not fooled – over 140 groups and over 360,000 citizens stated their opposition to 2,4-D during the public comments period during the approval process.

And in more hopeful news, in California we will soon have a ballot measure that requires food makers to label their products that include genetically modified organisms. So get ready for November and cast your vote FOR freedom of information

A t-shirt I saw at a recent Earth Day event said it all: GMO? OMG!

Water is the third ingredient in our Top Three Absolute Requirements for Life, after air and ahead of food. Lately I’ve been reading about a concept called “virtual water,” or your “water footprint.” This is the sum of all the water that goes into supporting your life. We naturally think of the water we drink, flush, and bathe in. But did you realize that we use water to grow our food, grow the cotton for our clothes, and generate energy? The list goes on.

The Nature Conservancy, using information from the Water Footprint Network, has prepared an amazing infographic. The average American’s water footprint is… almost 33,000 glasses a day, or over 750,000 gallons a year. Most of this is NOT in what we drink. The biggest user of water is livestock that we eat as meat. Cotton is next – check out the infographic here.

National Geographic gives even more details. One pound of beef requires 1,800 gallons of water. Soybeans require only 216. Refined sugar requires 198. Check out their “embedded water” site here.

Since water for drinking and sustaining other non-human life obviously trumps waste, we are all involved in this issue.

What you can do:

Use less water to do dishes, laundry, and bathing. This means full dishwasher, shorter laundry cycles, and shorter showers.
Use less energy of all kinds. We get some hydroenergy from damming rivers.
Fix leaky faucets.
Eat less meat, or none.
Compost food scraps instead of using water and electricity to send them down the disposal.
Find more information in The Green Foodprint.

There’s only a certain amount of fresh water on earth at any point in the water circulation cycle. Let’s use it wisely.

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