Food and Nutrition:
What Everyone Needs to Know
Chapter 3
Big Food Costs: Environmental Damage, Resource Depletion, and Climate Change
Chapter 3: Key Themes and Abstract
Big Food, Big Ag, and Big Public Health Nutrition Costs
This chapter examines the major challenges, environmental impacts, and sustainability of today’s global agrifood system, including conventional (industrial) agriculture, commercial fishing, and food waste. It discusses how agriculture causes climate change while being shaped by its effects, as warmer temperatures and unstable weather like droughts and floods impact crop productivity and nutrient composition, threatening global food security. It describes how livestock production and factory farms (to make meat, dairy, and eggs) and the agrifood system drive deforestation, emitting greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, contributing to global warming. It examines water, fertilizers, and pesticides in food production and their relation to dead zones, pollution, soil degradation, and climate change. It scrutinizes the commercial fishing industry, sharing how overfishing and bycatch have diminished biodiversity and disrupted ocean ecosystems. The chapter closes on food waste and food loss, including its magnitude, causes, and impact on climate change and the environment.
Guiding Questions
- What is the relationship between agriculture, greenhouse gases, and climate change?
- How do fertilizers contribute to soil erosion and climate change?
- How do pesticides threaten human health and the environment—and are they necessary for food security?
- How much water does agriculture use, and what is a dead zone?
- What’s behind commercial wild-caught fishing—and why do overfishing and bycatch matter?
- How and why is food wasted, and what are the planetary impacts?
True Costs of Food Production
Explore the grave environmental costs of food production in Chapter 3, rooted in a nutritional ecology framework, an excellent introductory text for students across a range of food and environmental science classes, as well as nutrition and public health.
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