Full Planet Empty Plates Chapter Summary

Is eating meat a detrimental threat to the environment? This debate over meat’s involvement in the global warming crisis was what inspired Nicolette Hahn Niman to write, “The Carnivore’s Dilemma.” Niman hoped writing, “The Carnivore’s Dilemma,” would cause her audience to understand that eating meat, raised on traditional farms, was a superior alternative to vegetarianism. Niman supported her claim by explaining how industrialized farms and vegetarians produce more of the three greenhouse gases that caused global warming, than that produced by traditional farms. Niman’s article fell short of being effective due to flaws in her supporting evidence and conclusion.

“Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat”, is a famous quote by the well known philosopher Socrates, who believed this is the perspective we should take when we are eating food. Unfortunately, the times have changed and so has the way we eat. We no longer have to go hunting for our food, or grow crops to receive all of our fruits and vegetables. Because we have become a society that has grown into the new world of technology, there would be no need to rely on ourselves for what we need-- we can simply gather our resources from other people. In the book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, written by Michael Pollan, takes us on a journey full of concerns of the “Food Industrial Complex”.

Eating Towards Global Warming Global warming has been a topic of debate for many years now. A more recent argument is that food production is a key contributing factor to the global warming epidemic. In the article “A Carnivore’s Dilemma”, Nicolette Niman provides an insight to the logistics being said in these statements.

Some 80 years ago the problem with food was not quality and if families could afford it, the problem was with the abundance of food as a whole. With the Dust Bowl destroying crops all over America, many could not afford the rising prices. Today we have an abundance of food supply but a percent of families cannot afford to buy enough for their

By challenging common assumptions and being ethical he effectively claims that the solution to solving these global hunger problems is foreign assistance. Paarlberg shows Pathos, Ethos and Logos through the thought of unravelling worldwide starvation by being realistic of the view on pre-industrial food and farming. Pathos is clearly evident in Paarlberg’s article through the presentation of the food insecurity problem in Africa and Asia. He uses impassioned words as an attempt to reach out to his target audience on a more emotional level by agitating and drawing sympathy of whole food shoppers and policy makers. Paarlberg employs Pathos during the article when he says, “The majority of truly undernourished people -- 62 percent, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization -- live in either Africa or South Asia, and most are small farmers or rural landless laborers living in the countryside of Africa and South Asia” (page 611-12).

In short, many people around the United States suffer from food instability and hunger. People can’t always help the situations they are in, but there are things almost everyone can do to help the hunger situation in

In the US, 40% of food produced, or approximately 365 million pounds of food, is wasted each day. Food waste, however, is a problem that extends beyond America, affecting billions of people as a global issue. The overwhelming amounts of food that are being discarded contribute to global warming and climate change, and prevent the massive number of hungry people from being able to eat nourishing meals. Humanity as a whole must be more mindful of the Earth and its health, as we are the source which most directly affect it. Due to the profound environmental impacts of food waste, a reduction in the amount disposed is necessary to create a more sustainable environment, and humans have a responsibility to protect the planet, even if it requires drastic changes to the current food system.

World hunger has always been a problem that has plagued humanity, and through the years, it has remained an almost impossible problem to solve. However, industrialized agriculture has become a possible solution to world hunger with its ability to produce more food on less land than traditional methods. Industrialized agriculture is the solution Robert Paarlberg offers in his article, “Attention Whole Food Shoppers” which first appeared in April 2010 edition of Foreign Policy. Paarlberg attempts to use specific criteria to demonstrate the benefits of industrialized agriculture, such as its impacts on world hunger, the income gap, and global politics. Paarlberg was to an extent successful at proving his points and persuading his intended audience.

In the world, there are one billion people undernourished and one and a half billion more people overweight. In this day and age, where food has become a means of profit rather than a means of keeping people thriving and healthy, Raj Patel took it upon himself to explore why our world has become the home of these two opposite extremes: the stuffed and the starved. He does so by travelling the world and investigating the mess that was created by the big men (corporate food companies) when they took power away from the little men (farmers and farm workers) in order to provide for everyone else (the consumers) as conveniently and profitably as possible. In his book Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, Patel reveals his findings and tries to reach out to people not just as readers, but also as consumers, in hopes of regaining control over the one thing that has brought us all down: the world food system.

The third article, “Ending world hunger by stopping food waste in the fields” By Bjorn Lomborg tell the reader about how one quarter of all

Any time that we realize our food is running out, the immediate solution is to just pump out more product as quickly and as cheaply as humanly possible in an effort to keep a steady income being produced from the same resource. The possibility of a different answer, like suggesting a dramatic lifestyle change to those within the country, is never viewed as an option, simply because there is a large chance it may not work. Examples of mass food production as a solution can be found across any food production, but especially in meat. Poultry and beef have been proved to be a massive issue with fresh water consumption and land useage. We do not have enough land on the entire earth to support our current addiction to meat, and hardly a person seems to feel the need to bat an eye at the idea that it could be destroying us.

Fighting also forces millions of people to flee their homes, leading to hunger emergencies as the displaced find themselves without the means to feed themselves.3 Across the world so many people are struggling for food because of war. This can happen because the countries are poor or air raid can strike things that were helping to grow food and to have fresh water. People get pushed out of their home and then the hunger population grows, by a lot. Natural disasters such as floods, tropical storms and long periods of drought are on the increase -- with calamitous consequences for the hungry poor in developing countries.3 Natural disasters, it happens. Things such as tornadoes, hurricanes and floods leave people to starve.

Over the past years, the average global temperature on Earth has increased significantly due to gas emissions. The demand for fruits, meats and other sources of food has been rising rapidly and respectively with the increase in Earth’s temperature due to increase in gas emissions in the atmosphere and the expanding global population. More significantly, countries with huge amounts of population growth, such as the United States, China, India, and the European Union have greater demand for food, which has higher carbon footprints. For example, China with 9040.74 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, and is number for fuel combustion. 1 The problem is that people do not know that switching to vegetarianism can help reduce the causes of global warming, which means what you eat can affect how the world will be in the future.

Even the number of hungry people in the world exceeds the total population of US and European Union. Extreme hunger and mal¬nutrition remain as blockade to development and creates a set up from which people cannot easily go out. Hunger and malnutrition mean less productive individuals, who are more susceptible to disease and often unable to earn much more and improve their livelihoods. There are nearly 800 million people in this world who suffer from hunger worldwide, the major¬ity

People in these countries are not hungry because there is not enough food to go around but rather the food available is too costly for a poor person to afford, people tend to believe that the poor are unemployed because they are lazy to find jobs but keep on producing children. While this may be true it is not about the main issue that causes poverty in our countries, it is hard to believe a poor person will choose to live their life being poor with little to go around. I believe everyone would love to live their lifestyle like these celebrities with flashy cars and houses. In most cases misfortune falls upon these people living them nothing to survive on, an example is the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. Thousand of people were left homeless with no resources to survive on.