580 billion pounds of carbon dioxide?

If you’ve seen Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, you might want to check out his website http://www.climatecrisis.net. My environmental friend Angela, forwarded me these thoughts on buying food from his website.

• Buy locally grown and produced foods. The average meal in the United States travels 1,200 miles from the farm to your plate. Buying locally will save fuel and keep money in your community.
• Buy fresh foods instead of frozen. Frozen food uses 10 times more energy to produce.
• Seek out and support local farmers markets. They reduce the amount of energy required to grow and transport the food to you by one fifth. You can find a farmer’s market in your area at the USDA website.
• Buy organic foods as much as possible. Organic soils capture and store carbon dioxide at much higher levels than soils from conventional farms. If we grew all of our corn and soybeans organically, we’d remove 580 billion pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere!
• Avoid heavily packaged products. You can save 1,200 pounds of carbon dioxide if you cut down your garbage by 10%.
• Eat less meat. Methane is the second most significant greenhouse gas and cows are one of the greatest methane emitters. Their grassy diet and multiple stomachs cause them to produce methane, which they exhale with every breath.

The film, if you haven’t seen it yet, presents a lot of compelling data on global warming. I’d recommend checking it out. Purchase An Inconvenient Truth here.