This week we looked at the problem of "how to feed our growing population" the resources this week were very interesting. We learned about what the population of the world looks like now and where we project it to go as well as what's keeping us from mass starvation. The answer is advanced agriculture which includes- improved plant breeding and the use of chemical fertilizers. This is a double-edged sword because as we leaned last week, the chemical fertilizers can have a great deal of damage on the ecosystem around because of the chemicals in it. This week we volunteer with Wasatch Community Gardens and helped them make new plotting beds for the planting season to come. Below are questions and answers prompted by my professor: 1) How does Green Team garden address the 3 pillars of sustainability? The three pillars are Social, Environmental and Economic Sustainability. For Social Sustainability: this pillar is all about the people to make a difference and make sure what we do will be able to be done for years. So for the community gardens, they do this with the fact that they are a community garden, people are able to get organic food for a lower price and sustainably and all it costs is the $30 rental fee and the time to care for the garden. They contribute to the environmental pillar with the fact that different people plant different seeds, this is good so one crop can't strip the soil. The plant diversity makes it so the lands will be able to be planted on for a long time. The economic pillar gets supported by the community giving back to one another, the recreation center that holds the plots of land get money to pay for the watering and management by the $30 plot fee. This makes it so the gardens can keep on functioning. 2) Feeding a growing population is going to require that we each become more mindful of our food choices. Look through your home and find one food item that you use. Discuss the "foodprint" of that food item and find a realistic alternative (i.e. something that YOU can actually do) for it that is less harmful to our resources. I have eggs and beans every morning for breakfast, I use eggs from my friends coop and pinto beans from Walmart. The only thing I could find about the pinto bean is that it requires more room to grow than pole beans like the green bean, but because it is used to warmer climates it can handle drought well so it does not require a lot of water. I don't think there is a good alternative to this because, if cooked right, it doesn't take as much green house emissions to transport and cook dried pinto beans as it does canned pinto beans. Canned beans cause more emissions because of the added weight of the expanded bean and the water it's in. When cooking dried beans, I soak them over night and then cook them for maybe an hour tops in the pressure cooker on my electric stove so I think I am making the best choice currently. 3) Reflect on the 5 ways we can possibly feed 9 billion people. Find an example of how we as a society are currently working on one of the 5 ways and discuss it using specifics.
4) Describe your photo and why you chose to take and post that particular photo and what is it's connection to the topic of the week. The photos from this week are from our team being at the community garden, I chose these photos 1. because the boys in them are showing that they are having a super time and 2. because it shows that we were getting out and getting dirty and really working. It was a lot of fun, and I think it was because we had so many people working together that made it more fun than it would have been had this all been left to one person to complete. 5) What was one thing that you found particularly interesting this week? I thought the waste documentary we watched was the most interesting, this is because it touched on more personal things than the statistic "1 in 8 people don't have enough to eat". Where yes this is a data point for the world, I am fortunate enough to have enough to eat. So in the waste video, they talked about the food in the grocery store, how 40% of food grown for stores isn't eaten, how food is the #1 product by weight in landfills today, how if food waste were a country, it would rank 3rd in greenhouse gas emissions. These are things I can relate to because I see food waste, I work in catering and I cannot tell you how much food we throw away at the end of the night. How much food we waste because the guests didn't want it but we made enough so we wouldn't run out. Something that we all need to be aware of is "the average American household spends approximately $2,000 a year on wasted food". This is a waste of money for a household consumer, but also this is a waste of space in our landfills for food that's going to rot and release methane gas. Below I have attached the video for reference.
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