Ginger Kowal
ENVS 101
4-21-05
Sustainability Essay
Is the food system that I participate in in my hometown of Asheville, North Carolina,
sustainable? If not, what alternative food systems could I participate in, and how sustainable
would they be? [Great question]
As a resident in the inner suburbs of the small city of Asheville in the mountains of western
North Carolina, one of the choices that I make every day that has an extremely large impact on both
the local and global environment is the food that I choose to buy and eat. The food system that I
choose to participate in has a large and continuous effect on the environment, because food comes
necessarily from the manipulation of natural processes and because the choice of what food to eat is
made multiple times daily. In this study [essay?], I am interested in assessing whether or not the food
system that I participate in, which is the food system that most residents of Asheville use, is
sustainable. If this food system is judged not to be sustainable, I mean to pose some alternatives and to
judge the sustainability of this alternative in turn. For the purposes of this study, I will consider that an
activity which is sustainable is an activity that does not rely on nonrenewable material or energy
resources, and that does not cause irreparable or continuous damage to any natural ecosystem. [nice
clear introduction]
The food that is for sale at most Asheville supermarkets is not local and not organically grown.
Because the land that surrounds the city of Asheville is mountainous, farming in the area has
historically been of a scale that is severely limited by the terrain of the area and the limitations of the
land. These small farms are not able to compete with the large-scale industrial farms that exist in other
areas of the country, and therefore it is from these industrial farms that most of the food in average
Asheville supermarkets comes from [you might define specifically what you mean by industrial farm].
The food in the supermarkets is thus trucked in from diverse and widely spread areas of the country, or
shipped in from international producers. Because the farms are so far away and because food is
minimally labeled as to its origins, consumers in Asheville generally have very little knowledge of the
type of farm that their food came from, or of the methods used in its production. There is almost no
organic food available at the average supermarket in Asheville, and so all of the food that I, and other
average residents, buy is grown using conventional, non-organic methods.
According to the provided definition of sustainability, this conventional food system in
Asheville is not sustainable because of many factors. The transportation of the food itself from farm
throughout the country to the consumers in Asheville supermarkets is supremely unsustainable because
it uses vast amounts of nonrenewable resources, and causes damage to natural ecosystems on a global
scale. The most common form of transportation for food across the country is by tractor trailer. These
vehicles use nonrenewable fossil fuels to run, and contribute significantly to nationwide emissions of
CO2 [might be useful to cite a statistic here]. The emissions of CO2 caused by fossil fuel combustion,
in combination with other factors, has been largely responsible for an increase in global atmospheric
concentrations of CO2 from 315ppm in 1957 to 362ppm in 1997 (Vitousek et al. 1997). This increase
in CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere is chief among human activities which scientists agree
“unequivocally” have substantially changed the earth’s climate (Oreskes 2004). Thus the nationwide
system of food distribution, which includes Asheville consumers like myself, is implicated in causing
global warming, which has already caused damage to many vulnerable ecosystems worldwide [again,
cite a reference here].
