Food

When making food choices, I buy organic, pasture raised and fed, and chemical free. Partly, I do this because I care about the environment and I can afford it. I don't pay my food bills, my parents do and they don't mind me spending twice as much for organic food. However, the main reason I buy organic food is because I can't eat a lot of conventionally grown food. I develop allergies if I eat conventionally grown food, but I have few problems if I eat organic food. Over the years, I have developed a wheat allergy, a peanut allergy, and a number of fruit allergies, but once I switched to organic, these allergies went away . I can't be the only person in this country who has issues eating foods covered in pesticides and chemicals, that has been irradiated, and shipped from thousands of miles away. 

Ideally, I would also like to eat locally, but that is really hard to do in DC. When I go to Wholefoods, almost everything is from California, with the rest of the produce coming from Florida, Washington state, and other countries. There are farms in Maryland and Virginia, some of which grow organic food, but none of it is sold where I shop. It is frustrating, especially since I used to eat organically and locally, but it is easy to do in Florida. My parent's live across the street from a farm and every town has at least one farmer's market or farmer's co-op. I could get organic, locally raised chickens, shrimp, fish, lambs, and goats that were fed what they were supposed to eat instead of the industrialized wheat and antibiotic diet that is becoming the norm. 

I think its the fact that I can't eat locally in DC easily that has the worst impact on the environment, instead of a particular food I have eaten recently. I know that there are places to get organic, locally grown food in DC, but they aren't very easy to get to considering I don't have a car so I don't go to these places to buy organic, locally grown food. I realize its just laziness on my part as I could take a cab to get the food back to my apartment. I know locally grown food is better for the environment, but the environmental impact of driving the 15-20 miles to buy it has more of an apparent environmental impact, from my perspective, then buying organically grown food from 5 states away, as I would actively be taking part in the driving. I can easily ignore the impact of transporting the food as I had no part in it, especially since it means that I can shop at a local grocery store, instead of going out of my way to be environmentally friendly.