| By :
Alison Withers
Copyright (c) 2010 Alison Withers The issues of cutting our energy use and agreeing on solutions acceptable to all nations seem to be as far away as ever despite preliminary talks in China ahead of the next Climate Change Summit due to be held at the end of November in Cancun, Mexico. As individuals many of us are, it seems, more willing to do what we can to reduce our energy consumption, including all the increasingly common things like using energy-saving lightbulbs, switching electrical gadgets off instead of leaving them on standby and sorting our waste to be able to recycle more. But what about food? It is increasingly common to see people carrying re-usable bags when doing the weekly shopping and, of course more are "buying local" although calculating the carbon footprint and energy consumption of food production is less clear-cut than simply buying local would suggest. There are other ways of being more energy efficient when it comes to food. Eating less meat is the most obvious example because it is generally acknowledged to be the most energy inefficient form of food production. A recent economic analysis in the USA of farmers growing genetically modified crops has found that actually the farmers who benfited most economically were not those who used GM seeds but those who didn't. It focused on a particular pest for growers of maize, the corn borer moth. Farmers who were growing from GM seed that contained a bacterial gene that caused the plants to give off a protein toxic to the moths had benefited from the resulting decline in the pests but it was the farmers not using the GM seed who gained the most economically. This was because they not only reaped the benefit of the area-wide impact of the pest reduction from the GM crops but also because they were not paying the technology fees that are part of the costs of buying the GM seed. If the farmers pass on some of that cost saving to consumers it could also be a cost benefit to environmentally conscious shoppers, many of whom in Europe and the UK are in any case very suspicious of genetic modification and look for more natural or organic products. Equally, if farmers use the new ranges of low-chem agricultural products (such as biopesticides and yield enhancers) being produced by biopesticides developers, which help farming to be more sustainable and economical, theoretically consumers should also benefit from lower food prices in the shops. There are also ways that individuals can do their bit for the environment when it comes to cooking in the home. As well as buying and eating less meat and making sure left-overs are used, cooking with gas is more environmentally friendly than cooking with electricity. Other ideas include planning meals that can be cooked in the oven rather than using several burners as well, and also preparing and cooking more than one meal in the oven, which has the added bonus that you come home from work to a ready-prepared meal that only has to be warmed up and as they say, every little helps.
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