Peter Singer The Good Life Analysis

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In Peter Singer’s The Good Life he mentions that “the brain is a tool for reasoning, and a capacity to reason helps us to survive, to feed ourselves, and to safeguard our children.” (264) As college students make the transition from home life to living at a university, they lose the safety provided by their parents as well as certain amenities, such as home-cooked meals. In order to help these new “adults” manage this transitory period, most universities require students to live in on-campus housing and purchase meal plans. These modern American dining halls included in the meal plan are typically open seven days a week, providing a constant flow of food and eliminating the stress of having to feed ourselves. The same continuous stockpile of …show more content…
On a larger scale, an estimated forty percent of the food produced in America is wasted and universities are only contributing to that waste. From an economic standpoint, the food Americans waste every year leads to billions of dollars being pointlessly spent to produce and prepare food that is never consumed. With many families living on tight budgets and the global population continuing to expand every year, the need to reconsider using our limited resources on producing food that is later trashed is immense. These wasted resources, such as water, fertilizer, land, and energy used to produce food are not only affecting the economy but are also part of the environmental consequences of food waste. Such environmental consequences are amplified by the fact that the food taken to landfills rots into methane gas, a potent greenhouse gas with a “high global warming potential.” (Scottish Environmental Protection Agency) The massive piles of food waste are one of the leading sources of man-made methane gas production. As Jared Diamond points out in his work “The World as Polder: What Does It Mean To Us Today,” we, as humans, are “the cause of our environmental problems, [and] we are the ones in control of them.” Since universities are contributing to the problem of large scale food waste, they can also take control and work to create more sustainable practices while also helping students through the transition from high school to

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