{"id":186,"date":"2020-01-31T16:09:43","date_gmt":"2020-01-31T16:09:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/food-experience\/?p=186"},"modified":"2020-01-31T16:09:43","modified_gmt":"2020-01-31T16:09:43","slug":"you-and-the-food-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/food-experience\/2020\/01\/31\/you-and-the-food-system\/","title":{"rendered":"You and The Food System"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Bagels:<\/strong> During this three-day timeframe, one thing I ate everyday was a bagel.\u00a0 The first ingredient listed on the plain bagel package is enriched wheat flour.\u00a0 This type of flour is called enriched flour, because it goes through an enrichment process.\u00a0 During the milling process the natural nutrients from wheat are lost. \u00a0\u00a0This process adds several nutrients, such as minerals and vitamins, to back into the refined flour.\u00a0 These nutrients are niacin, thiamin, riboflavin, folic acid, and iron.\u00a0 Enriched wheat flour starts off as wheat.\u00a0 Since China is the largest producer of wheat, for this product I\u2019ve made the assumption the wheat was grown in China.\u00a0 Other areas wheat is commonly grown in are India, Russia, and the United States, to name a few.\u00a0 Once the wheat is cultivated it is either transported by barge, rail, or truck.\u00a0 From there it is stored, separated and put through a thorough process.\u00a0 This process consists of removing unnecessary material, removal of impurities, and eventually the grinding, purifying, and sifting into different flours.\u00a0 My assumption is that the cultivation of the wheat creates large environmental impacts in the process.\u00a0 The cultivation of wheat involves fertilizers that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.\u00a0 I also think that the tilling of the soil and irrigation create other environmental problems as well.\u00a0 Another energy-intensive aspect in order to create this ingredient is the electricity and power for the production facilities.\u00a0 In order to calculate the food miles to get a bagel on my plate, I found a food miles\u2019 calculator.\u00a0 This calculated roughly how many miles it took for enriched flour to arrive in the US.\u00a0 After this calculation I think the food miles for my bagel would be roughly 7500 miles.\u00a0 However, this is an estimate that mainly take into account the miles from China.<\/p>\n

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Baby Carrots:<\/strong> Another food I ate every day and more than once each day was carrots, usually baby carrots.\u00a0 Carrots only consist of one ingredient, and that\u2019s carrots.\u00a0 I was surprised to discover that most of the US grown carrots are grown in California.\u00a0 The process of producing baby carrots is by first harvesting full-sized carrots from the fields.\u00a0 Once they are harvested they are washed, sorted, sized, cut, peeled, and polished.\u00a0 Smaller carrots are processed, shaped, and packaged.\u00a0 The pesticides used on carrots crops, like other crops, cause damage to the environment.\u00a0 The production process of the carrots is energy intensive, thus adding to harmful environmental impacts.\u00a0However, baby carrots have the flexibility to use more of the carrot resulting in wasting less carrots.\u00a0 Carrots can be sold locally, but are often packaged in many different ways.\u00a0 Most commonly seen in stores are the bags of baby carrots, other products are snack size ranch with baby carrots or thrown into a plastic to-go snack kit.\u00a0 After comparing a few different food mile websites for carrots, I am thinking roughly 2000 miles to reach my refrigerator.\u00a0 Similarly, to the bagel this estimate doesn\u2019t include the miles that the carrots gain during the processing and packing process.<\/p>\n

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Dried Mangos:<\/strong> The last food item I choose from my list was dried mango slices.\u00a0 These dried mangos don\u2019t have any added ingredients; they are just dried mangos.\u00a0 I bought these dried mangos from Trader Joe\u2019s and the package claims the mangos are a product of Mexico, which makes sense since they are one of the top producers of Mangos.\u00a0 Once the Mangos are grown and picked from their trees, they are carefully selected.\u00a0 The mangoes used for drying purposes are the ones without damage, pests, and have a good overall appearance.\u00a0 From there the mangos are trimmed and washed.\u00a0 Once they have been cleaned well, each mango is peeled and cored.\u00a0 Out of these steps, from my understanding, there isn\u2019t too much human involvement.\u00a0 However, the cutting of the mangos is sometimes performed by many people.\u00a0Finally, the mangos go on to blanching, to be sterilized, drying, and packing.\u00a0 These steps can be pretty energy intensive, resulting in the release of greenhouse gases into the environment.\u00a0 The online calculation I found for dried mangos was roughly 5500 miles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bagels: During this three-day timeframe, one thing I ate everyday was a bagel.\u00a0 The first ingredient listed on the plain bagel package is enriched wheat flour.\u00a0 This type of flour is called enriched flour, because it goes through an enrichment process.\u00a0 During the milling process the natural nutrients from wheat are lost. \u00a0\u00a0This process adds […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4176,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[246122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elizabeth-poulin","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/food-experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/food-experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/food-experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/food-experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4176"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/food-experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/food-experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/food-experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/food-experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/food-experience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}