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Green Food & Drink
World Food Prices On The Rise
The United Nations stated that world food prices hit a record high in January 2011, suggesting that food is now more costly than it has ever been. Grains are more costly than ever, as corn prices have gone up 53%. Wheat is up 47% and rice is at its highest cost in over 2 years. The global economy is still recovering from the past few years, and the high food prices could really cause many people to struggle even more so than they have. The cause for the high prices isn’t very clear. Bad weather is a definite contributor. For example, a heat wave in Russia last summer destroyed grain harvests and forced the country to suspend exports, which threw off global markets. Excessive heat in the Midwest affected the corn crop, resulting in a 5% drop in production last year. There is a rising demand for food, and especially for meat, whose production needs a lot of water and grain, and that demand is straining supplies. The production of ethanol sucks up cropland and grain that could be otherwise utilized for food. 40% of the corn crop in the United States is currently used to make fuel for cars, with ...- Bookmark :
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The Quality Of Your Drinking Water
The drinking water of a large number of cities in the United States contains an unhealthy amount of contaminants and chemicals. Some organizations and state environmental agencies that analyze water data claim that the level of chemicals in some drinking water is higher than the recommended health guidelines and the pollutants found in the water are higher than the limitations set by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Unknown to most Americans, a surprising number of U.S. cities have drinking water with unhealthy levels of chemicals and contaminants. 24/7 Wall St, a website that took a cold hard look at the quality of water supplies in big cities, utilized data from the Environmental Working Group that was collected for a five year period that ended in 2009. While some cities failed to submit the necessary information for the database including Salt Lake City, Washington D.C. and Detroit, cities in other states provided inadequate data to be included in the database including cities in Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Kansas and Louisiana. The test results from the national database reported 316 contaminants in water that is supplied to 256 million Americans in 48,000 communities in 45 states. The data suggests that there were 202 ...- Bookmark :
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The Low Down On BPA In Canned Goods
The National Workgroup for Safe Markets is a coalition of public and environmental health advocacy groups. They published a report that revealed that cans of food expose people to dangerous levels of bisphenol A (BPA), which is a hormone-disrupting chemical that has been connected to aggression in children, heart disease and obesity. The report examines the levels of BPA in canned food products in addition to how much BPA the average person would consume from eating the foods that are packaged in those cans. 50 samples of canned foods were gathered from home cupboards in 19 states and 1 Canadian province. The samples were tested by an independent lab, which measured the BPA levels in the cans. The lab found BPA in 92% of the canned foods. The research found that people, who ate their meals throughout the day from canned goods, had high levels of BPA in their system. Even someone who had only a can of veggies at dinner and a can of soda had a high amount of BPA in their system. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) states that a low exposure level of BPA per day is safe, however low levels of BPA have been connected to aggressive ...- Bookmark :
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The Food Movement
The environmental movement is facing some challenges. Supporters of the movement are starting to accept that the chance of both national and international action on climate change has become an afterthought. Republicans in Congress are attacking the Environmental Protection Agency, arguing against putting more money toward environmental protection since the country is in so much debt. The environmental movement has been challenged to maintain its importance in a rough political climate that isn’t always rooting for the environment. The food movement is on the rise and it is bringing together producers, consumers, politicians and the media. The food movement’s growth might be able to start a social and political transformation that the environmentalists have been striving for in recent years. The food movement strives to change the way Americans eat, the way they farm, and moving them away from cheap calories and industrialized food production and toward smaller scale organic food production. The food movement is a series of organized smaller mobilizations, rather than a single national movement. A producer for the documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, explained that routine family dinners improve both eating habits and schoolwork and positive behavior for families. All around the country, activists are speaking about a ...- Bookmark :
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The Value of Organic Food
Some say that organic food isn’t for everyone mostly because of the higher prices. However, there are many benefits to adopting an organically based diet. The economy is developing rapidly and thus urbanization is seeing exponential growth. There is an important connection between health concerns and urbanization like obesity, as a result of changes in diets, the consumption of unhealthy foods, and stressful living. The United Nations World Urbanization Prospects report claims that the urban population on the global level increased from 220 million in 1900 to 3.2 billion in 2005, with projections aimed at 4.9 billion by 2030. After taking notice of the exponential growth of urbanization and the correlating health concerns, it’s obvious that incorporating an organic food centric diet will help maintain healthier lifestyles. Demands for food are on the rise as populations continue to grow fast. It is thought that the demand for good will surpass 30 trillion dollars by 2030, thus agricultural outputs have to grow to meet these demands. In 2007, the Environmental Health Perspectives conducted a study that suggested that organic farming was capable of yielding enough food on a global level to keep up with the current population, as well as a potentially larger ...- Bookmark :
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