Your Food Choices Affect the Earth’s Climate
Every action has a cost, even for growing food and delivering it to your dinner plate. A team of researchers has found that meat production releases more climate-warming pollution than it does when producing fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains. Their calculations suggest that people could do a lot to slow global warming if they limited the amount of meat they eat.
There are plenty of “costs” of food. As to the visible costs, people pay money for the food as well as the fuel needed to get groceries to the store or restaurant. And there are less-visible “costs” of food as well. Producing foods takes resources, for example, the water used to irritate (灌溉) crop fields or the fertilizer and chemicals used to promote plant growth and fight pests.
Peter Scarborough at the University of Oxford in England decided to calculate some of the less-visible pollution created by food production. His team focused on greenhouse gases emitted through the production of our food, including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (甲烷) and the nitrous oxide (氧化亚氮). All three gases are powerful in warming the earth’s atmosphere.
They conducted a series of experiments and fed the data collected into a computer and then included the amount of greenhouse gases linked with producing nearly 100 common foods. Then the computer matched those greenhouse-gas amounts to the mix of foods each person had reported eating.
It shows that the diet of someone whose meals included an average of 50 to 99 grams of meat each day would be responsible for the daily release of 5.6 kilograms of CO2 equivalent (等量) while those vegans had the lowest diet-linked greenhouse-gas emissions (2.9 kg of CO2 equivalent).
It is concluded that reducing the intake of meat and other animal-based products can make a valuable contribution to climate change reduction. And compared to meat, more plant-based food can be grown on more lands with less water and other resources. In places where many people are going hungry, raising animals for meat may make it harder to ensure that everyone gets enough to eat.
1. What do the researchers’ calculations suggest?2. Why does the author say there are also less-visible “costs” of food?
3. Please decide which part is false in the following statement, then underline it and explain why.
Although plant-based food is harder to adapt to more types of lands than meat, it has a lower requirement of water and other resources.
4. Apart from food choices, what can you do to protect the environment? (In about 40 words)
Fern loved Wilbur more than anything. She loved to stroke him, to feed him, to put him to bed. Every morning, as soon as she got up, she warmed his milk, tied his bib on, and held the bottle for him. Every afternoon, when the school bus stopped in front of her house, she jumped out and ran to the kitchen to fix another bottle for him. She fed him again at suppertime, and again just before going to bed. Mrs. Arable gave him a feeding around noontime each day, when Fern was away in school. Wilbur loved his milk, and he was never happier than when Fern was warming up a bottle for him. He would stand and gaze up at her with adoring eyes.
For the first few days of his life, Wilbur was allowed to live in a box near the stove in the kitchen. Then, when Mrs. Arable complained, he was moved to a bigger box in the woodshed. At two weeks of age, he was moved outdoors. It was apple-blossom time, and the days were getting warmer. Mr. Arable fixed a small yard specially for Wilbur under an apple tree, and gave him a large wooden box full of straw, with a doorway cut in it so he could walk in and out as he pleased.
“Won't he be cold at night?” asked Fern.
“No,” said her father. “You watch and see what he does.”
Carrying a bottle of milk, Fern sat down under the apple tree inside the yard. Wilbur ran to her and she held the bottle for him while he sucked. When he had finished the last drop, he grunted and walked sleepily into the box. Fern peered through the door. Wilbur was poking the straw with his snout. In a short time he had dug a tunnel in the straw. He crawled into the tunnel and disappeared from sight, completely covered with straw.
Fern was enchanted. It relieved her mind to know that her baby would sleep covered up, and would stay warm.
1. How many times did Wilbur get fed every day?2. Where did Mr. Arable finally build a small “house” for Wilbur?
3. How did Fern feel when Wilbur first moved to his new “house” ?
4. What do you think of Fern?
