The Effects Of Convenience Diets

Nowadays, we think that much of our fresh foods and produce come directly from supermarkets since we directly buy it from them. But what we don’t see is the amount of transportation it takes for the food to get there, how much water and land it takes to make the food, and even where it comes from. Just like how supermarkets create such illusions of abundance and variety, the foods we consume everyday hide many environmental and health related effects right in front of our faces. Convenient foods often contain wasteful plastic packaging that end up polluting the environment. Foods that contain meat, dairy, or eggs are our daily staple, but it requires more energy to produce these foods because of trophic level efficiency (Porter, 2003, pp.4-5). Thus, we end up wasting a lot of water, vegetables, and land to produce a beef patty when it would less …show more content…
Interestingly, the convenient diet was the one that costed a lot more to pull off (refer to figure 2) in order to be convenient and save a lot of trouble cleaning dishes or cooking. If I had personally take on a convenience diet, I would end up buying a lot of those microwaveable heat up meals since they are very convenient and do not require much effort in cooking or cleaning. The issue with taking on such a diet is that the environmental impact index would become very high, because it’s very likely that convenient food products are wrapped in several layers of packaging (cardboard/ paper package, plastic film to cover the food, plastic tray to hold and heat the food). It is also likely that these foods aren’t local as well, since many of these convenient foods tend to have a brand name that is available in every major grocery store across the nation, thus creating transportation