Skip to main content

Blog 3: The environmental impacts of your meal

I recently made some tacos this past week for dinner. The ingredients I use when I make tacos is ground beef, taco seasoning, sour cream, lettuces, cheese, and sometimes black olives. Sour cream is made from light cream and contains no less than 19 percent milk fat. Sour cream is produced by adding a culture of Streptococcus lactic to pasteurized light cream and incubating at 72 degrees Fahrenheit until the desired flavor and thickness is reached. Tomatoes are commonly grow from seedlings started indoors that are later transplanted into the garden. They are planted indoors as early as 6 to 8 weeks before the average date of the last spring frost. Then they are transplanted into the garden 1 to 3 weeks after the last frost. Ground beef is processed meat, any meats that are not fresh. Processed meat has been modified from its natural state, either through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavor or improve preservation.

Since sour cream is made form milk, the dairy industry's share of total of US greenhouse gas emissions from farm to consumer, including waste. The global dairy sector increased by 18 percent between 2005 and 2015, the US and more than 93 percent of that water is used to grow feed for dairy cattle. Tomatoes does not have a negative impacted on the environment as long as pesticides have not been used on them. If they used pesticides then it could contaminate the air, water, and soil. Ground beef does impact the environment the most out of the three products I've talked about. It produces 11 times more greenhouse gases than staple plant-based foods. An example of how much CO2 is released into the atmosphere from beef being produced is for every kilogram of beef it is 26 kilograms of CO2.

I got all these products from the grocery store. I used my car as transportation. I would consider all the ingredients to be "local" and I mean "local" is by having them produced in Wisconsin. The waste the sour cream created was the plastic container it was in and the ground beef is the plastic wrapper and container it was in and it also creates grease as waste. The waste went into the garbage which when into a waste field which has a huge impact on the environment. 


https://www.californiadairypressroom.com/Products/Sour_Cream

https://harvesttotable.com/how_to_grow_tomatoes/#Quick_Tomato_Growing_Guide

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/faq-exactly-processed-meat-avoid-questions

https://www.worldwildlife.org/magazine/issues/winter-2019/articles/milk-s-impact-on-the-environment

https://www.livekindly.com/red-meat-planet/#:~:text=Beef%20production%20is%20particularly%20harmful,is%20released%20into%20the%20atmosphere.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Post 4: Reflecting on the environmental geography

The process to process ground beef or just the production of meat has a negative impact to the environment for multiple of reasons. Deforestation for agriculture is in South America, but since raising meat takes large quantities of feed, the Midwest is losing its native prairies and grasslands for farming. Which leads to another negative impact of the environment, changing the fields to agriculture fields releases carbon pollution into the air. The production of meat affects climate change when the manure decomposes it releases emissions including methane, ammonia, and carbon dioxide into the environment. The crop fields are treated with toxic chemicals and fertilizers with a higher quantity than the farmers use on plants letting all the excess to go into the surrounding waterways.  One action that can be taken at a global scale to reduce the environmental impact associated with the production of meat is to reduce enteric methane emissions. By using an enteric methane inhibitor tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Food Post

This past weekend I made a Doritos Taco Salad for a family gathering. In the salad there is ground beef, taco seasoning, lettuce, tomatoes, cheddar cheese, nacho cheese Doritos, and Catalina dressing. In the recipe I follow they put black beans in it as well but I do not include them. My family loves when I make it and is usually the first thing to go. First, you cook the meat then add the taco seasoning in. Then in a bowl you crunch up some Doritos and add all the ingredients in the bowl and mix everything together. This is a really easy recipe that everyone enjoys and a cheap snack as well. Below I have a link that is a recipe on how to make a Doritos Taco Salad. https://life-in-the-lofthouse.com/doritos-taco-salad/
Post a Comment
Read more