Utah's Own - Life At Its Best...: "Currently food delivered through the national chain stores uses 17 times more fossil fuel and releases as much as 20 times the emissions to deliver us the very same items that may be available nearby. If just 10% of our food came from sources within Utah, we would save hundreds of thousands of gallons of fossil fuel and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by millions of pounds. “Cheap” imported food has a very large price tag beside its purchase price. It places a hidden tax on your food."Having grown up on a farm right here in the good old SL Valley, I am stunned at how much farm land we have lost over the last 20 years and how unsustainable our community currently is. Basically we do not have the food production here in Utah to support our population. A good deal of our arable and, more importantly here in dry Utah, our irrigable farm land has been sucked up into cheaply-made, built-in-obsolesence-ready subdivisions where the chief produce is malcontented or prescription-drug-addled teenagers, philandering spouses (yes this happens quite a lot in our fake-clean little state), and Kentucky blue grass.
I would rant on, but that's certainly not working towards a solution. What are the solutions? How about a little more common sense in planning? My hell the Mormon pioneers survived out here by planning. Planning is not the enemy, nor is cooperation. The enemy is everyone thinking they can sit in their own little castle, never looking even as much in their front yard, and ignore the world.
Meh.
Dubya is right proud of you, son. You know because reserving the U.S.'s resources is SOOOoooo important to him.
ReplyDeleteI have tried to do my part by buying all my produce from a farmer in the summer time, and by trying to eat in season (aka, no tomatoes in January unless I roasted 'em myself last August). It's one of the hard things, isn't it, though--to try to buck a system that's totally pervasive.
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