By Bill Duesing
Should we take the environment
into consideration when we eat?
That is a very critical question
because crises with both food and the environment loom large as we look ahead
to the New Year and beyond.
Food and the environment are
intimately linked. Food comes from the
environment. How we grow food has environmental consequences. They can be, and currently are, very serious.
The good news is that recent
research and traditional knowledge point to ways of growing and eating that
produce health both for the environment and for people.
For the first time ever, the
advisory committee charged with creating the 2015 version of USDA's Dietary
Guidelines was considering including environmental costs in writing those
guidelines. Sounds like a good idea to me.
But not to everyone.
Language slipped into the
Cromnibus Bill, that massive piece of legislation (a.k.a., the agreement) that
Congress cobbled together quickly (!) and passed in December to keep the government
running, squashed any hope of connecting food choices with environmental
consequences:
... The
agreement directs the Secretary to only include nutrition and dietary
information, not extraneous factors, in the final 2015 Dietary Guidelines for
Americans.
Those
extraneous factors are identified in the bill language as "agriculture
production practices and environmental factors." Note 1.
 |
| Biodiversity loss, the nitrogen cycle and climate change are the three earth vital signs that are way outside the safe zone. All are directly caused by the industrial approach to agriculture, especially synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and herbicides. An increase in any of the three makes the others worse. |
If the government can't tell us
about how our food choices effect the environment, we inherit that responsibility.