I have never had to make a food choice until I attended American University. When I lived in Jordan, I used to go the vegetable market with my mother, I remember I used to marvel at how the fruit and vegetable were placed and I remember asking her, how do you choose which ones you get? She would give me a break down of which fruits/vegetables would come from neighboring countries then she would go on to explaining pesticides used and how she doesn’t want our vegetables to be sprayed with chemicals or genetically modified. At this point I was off in la-la-land, thinking of what I was going to do later on that evening or what movie I wanted to watch. It wasn’t until I came to college, and I went grocery shopping for the first time, I remembered what my mother was trying to teach me. I was SHOCKED at the size of a cucumber here. It was nearly a foot long! In Jordan cucumbers were tiny and full of taste. So that alone makes me think of genetically modified food, I personally do not enjoy the taste AT ALL. So basically when I’m choosing my groceries, truthfully I don’t really have the environment in mind (after this course I assure you I will). As a college student I have convenience in mind. I buy things I like to cook when I’m craving a homemade meal, along with the easy to make/grab and go snacks.
When I grocery shop, I feel the items with the greatest environmental impact are the meats and poultry, along with the water bottles. Growing up with Jordan, there was a huge water problem. If you would drink tap water you were bound to get sick. Restaurants wouldn’t give you the choice of tap or bottled, you had to buy the bottle. So when I came to DC I bought the Brita filter, but for some reason out of habit always bought bottled water, which I found more convenient and enjoyable.
Another big environmental impact is DELIVERY! My friends and I would joke around saying that people sleep to dream and in college we dream to sleep. If that’s the case- when do we have time to make our own meals! So we use our computers to order the food, then they get the message and fire up their ovens, they then put the food in disposable plastic containers, throw in 5 or 6 sets of plastic utensils (even though you just ordered one meal), and put the meal in its own plastic bag and the drink in the other bag and then put it all in one large plastic bag, then they drive it over to your apartment, and keep the car running while they run up to your floor and wait for your payment. You then eat what you can and throw everything else away.
If there’s one thing I noticed in this class is everything that has a huge environmental impact is convenient. We’ve based our lives around convenience and now the green dream is trying to make us change our methods. Saving the environment is key once people notice it (it took me a SIS course with depressing books to realize we’re punishing future generations by our actions) but until then they are just going to continue doing what easiest for them: People will eat imported foods and wines, buy huge amounts of meats and poultry and stash it their freezer just to buy some more the next time they go grocery shopping, and lastly like me- buy more and more plastic bottles because it taste better and is easier to just grab and continue with your life.
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