THE BOOK
The Global Warming Diet highlights three areas where food choices effect climate change: in the production and transportation of food, land management, and breeding of livestock. It is a smorgasbord of scientific fact and culinary art where the reader learns new ways to look at the climate crisis. At 250 pages, it offers a quick, enjoyable and informative read, and an entry point for readers new to the issues. It is expected to be release in 2008, but presentations on the subject are happening now in the greater San Francisco Bay area.
Production and Transportation
The average meal travels 1500 miles to get to your dinner plate. It is common for food to be grown in the West, sold to a broker in the Midwest and resold to the area it was originally grown. Food production, manufacturing and distribution consume 12 - 20 percent of the U. S. energy supply. All this moving about adds "food miles" to dinner and greenhouse gases into the environment. The food is also less fresh, less tasty, and less nutritious. However, sometimes it actually saves energy eating food shipped from Bangladesh rather than growing it in California. Additionally, organic agriculture uses only a 1/3 less fossil fuel than conventional agriculture. So what DO we eat, and when?
Land Management
We are eating the planet alive, so we need to keep her soil healthy. Healthy soil "holds carbon," "twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and three times more than is stored in Earth’s vegetation," says the Environmental Literacy Council. However, today’s soil is exhausted from too much fertilizer, pesticides, tilling, irrigation, compaction, manure, erosion and deforestation. Unhealthy soil disturbs the "carbon cycle," or the "breathing cycle" of the planet.
Livestock
In December 2006, the U. N. Food and Agricultural Organization published "Livestock’s Long Shadow." The report cites livestock as a major contributor to global warming, responsible for 18% of greenhouse gases that cause climate change, "a higher share than transport." Consider this:
- It takes 10 times more fossil fuels to produce a calorie of meat than a calorie of plant protein.
- Manure and animal gases produce methane, a gas with 23 times more "global warming potential" than CO2. They also produce nitrous oxide with 296 times worse than CO2. Methane produced by cows has the impact of adding 33 million cars to the roadways.
- U. S. factory farms produce nearly one billion tons of feces and urine annually or 5 million tons a day.
Solutions
Individual solutions include understanding and eating local, seasonal, organic food, eating fewer, happier animal products, and supporting energy alternatives and ideas like the Chicago Climate Exchange, the first legally binding carbon emissions market, which sells greenhouse gas credits "grown" by farmers. The Global Warming Diet addresses these subjects, inspiring a "save the planet" attitude by bringing food back to a central role in our lives with easy recipes, ideas for hosting fun "discussion parties" and simple tips on how to cook a global-cooling cuisine.
Literary agent: TED WEINSTEIN LITERARY MANAGEMENT
