Top of the Food Chain.

I sit in my World Ecological Problems class, a lecture hall filled with about sixty other students, and my teacher is lecturing about the food chain. The worry that it was going to be a very dry lecture day quickly turned into a picture of me hanging on Professor Wilson's every word. Our lecture weaved in and out of the basic concepts of food chain, but quickly turned to our choice of foods and the energy price we in turn pay for those choices.

In essence, as the sun's energy moves up the food chain, as much as ninety percent of that energy is lost. For example, when a cow eats grass and humans then eat the cow, much of the grain's energy will have been lost on the cow's metabolic process. So, eating meat is far less "evergy-efficient", so to speak, than eating a vegetarian diet. The lower on the food chain we eat and the more of the sun's energy we use, the more people the Earth will ultimately be able to sustain. In addition, far more fossil fuel energy is used in the production of meat as opposed to the production of crops. "Calorie for calorie, researchers estimate that beef requires 16 times more fossil fuel energy and creates 24 times more greenhouse gas emissions than a mixed diet of vegetables and grains" (Withgott 154).

My thoughts turned to our class discussions of Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and her ideas of keeping your food choices as close to home as possible, as natural as possible and as sustainable as possible. If each of us could take the small steps to incorporate more of these ideas into our routine food choices, the impact would be incredible.

Withgott, Jay, and Scott Brennan. Essential Environment: the Science behind the Stories. San Francisco: Pearson, 2009. Print.