I've been thinking a lot lately about how much food we consume, especially obese children. Not only is it huge in amounts, it's also huge in carbon footprint, because even if kids ate whole, natural foods, it'd cost the planet in water and fertilizer and tractor fuel and everything else in order to produce it. Then, if it's highly processed foods, things get very complicated. Take into consideration the conniption fits currently being had by Kellogg and other breakfast cereal manufacturers because of a major sugar shortage going on (so count on the really crappy cereals costing lots more in the immediate future). But it's not sugar from the US; it's sugar from India and Brazil, predominantly.
OK. So, there's a bunch of carbon footprint involved in growing the foods, including destruction of trees and habitat, careless water usage, and the rest of the list of production details. Then the sugar gets transported to the US on big fuel-greedy liners, soon to be moved onto diesel-greedy trucks, and sent to the various jillions of food factories that use sugar in their products. Then lots and lots of plastic and cardboard gets used to put the various products into, sugar as well as the infinite number of other scary chemicals and maybe a little grain. So. The factory mills the garbage into pretty pastel little munchies that people give their kids for breakfast and then trucks take those boxes all over the ENTIRE US. Difficult to remember that WAY BACK THERE, some human in Brazil drove a stinky old tractor around the sugarbeet field.
OK. So, a jillion little American fat kids stuff themselves on this crap and then get type 2 diabetes when they are ten years old.
Can you even imagine the MASSIVE reduction in carbon footprint and HUGE improvement in health and very cool monetary savings, if little kids would either eat something natural or just cut their intake of garbage in half???
This is all a REALLY good reason for me to reduce my calories drastically. I guess it would be cool to figure out a way to send the unused calories to Haiti or somewhere else where politicians eat all the food and let their citizens starve.
I ate 650 calories today. I read that in the malnourished parts of the Sehalian zone, they eat about 2,200 calories a day (http://www.find-health-articles.com/rec_pub_12891821-food-consumption-patterns-central-west-africa-1961-2000-challenges.htm). I'm confused, at least in part because so few of the websites about starvation actually give calorie counts. Of course, in Haiti they eat mud cookies that are full of fat, which has calories but still leads to malnutrition. See http://worldfocus.org/blog/2009/02/19/dirt-poor-haitians-eat-cookies-made-of-mud/4120/
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