Green Food

The recent growth in the interest in green consumer goods has made extensive inroads into food production and consumption patterns. This growth has accelerated over the past 20 years, with global sales of green food now in the billions of U.S. dollars every year. This article briefly considers what green food is, the reasons people are motivated to purchase and consume green food, and some of the multiple ways green food is grown. These categories often overlap, reflecting the complexity that inheres to the ecosystems in which green food is grown and in how such food is marketed, sold, and transported.

Green food can be considered to be any food product that is grown with environmental concerns at the forefront, outlined later. A farmer may be motivated to grow food in this way for any of the following reasons, whether for the individual merit of the reason or a mix of any of the possible motivating reasons: because of personal environmental or health commitments, for greater profit, to receive farming subsidies, because of changing legal requirements, because of religious/spiritual beliefs, and/or because of consumer demand. Consumers may be motivated to purchase green food for similar environmental, health, political, religious, and/or ethical reasons.

To say green food is food grown in an environmentally friendly manner can mean that a mix of any of the following green farming practices are used by a farmer in the growth [Page 211]and production of such food. The agricultural practices that appear on this list occur within an overall goal of striving toward soil and farm health and environmental sustainability:

• rotational grazing of livestock
• cover cropping
• applying compost to fields
• free-range grazing of livestock
• humane slaughtering of livestock
• provision of habitat for wildlife, birds, and soil organisms at various on-farm sites
• leaving some farm fields fallow for extended periods of time
• using natural, nonsynthetic, nonpolluting herbicides and pesticides that are not petroleum based (with the use of petroleum-based chemicals as a last resort, and then only strategically and in minimal doses)
• attempts to conserve on-farm water and soil
• paying farm workers a livable and humane wage
• use of seeds adapted to local ecosystems, where such seeds are available
• preservation of endangered seed and livestock species
• attempts to grow seasonal produce
• various other organic farming practices consistent with U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) or other international or third-party organic certification guidelines

Furthermore, green food and the farmers who grow green food, as well as the consumers who purchase green food products, in large part oppose the following industrial farming practices. These practices tend to be practiced by the overwhelming majority of farmers in the United States and other Western countries, and increasingly are being adopted in developing countries such as China and India:

• genetic engineering of crops, seeds, and livestock
• commodity farming of single, large-scale monocrops
• patenting of traditional seed varieties and indigenous farming methods by transnational corporations, called biopiracy by critics
• dependence on government subsidies that encourage farmers to grow monocrops, especially corn and soybean
• use of groundwater and depletion of healthy topsoil at unsustainable levels
• use of agrochemicals that critics claim lessen soil fertility, contribute to increased rates of cancer, and leech into waterways, eventually contributing to “dead zones” in various international bodies of water
• large-scale breeding and confinement of livestock that depend on increasingly larger doses of antibiotics and that generate multiple tons of manure waste daily, affecting the local water and air quality
• inhumane slaughtering of livestock
• loss of wildlife habitat and diverse ecosystems, as these are transformed into farms that grow monoculture crops or livestock for export markets

All of these practices are considered by proponents of green food farming practices to be environmentally damaging, are claimed to lead to the loss of farming communities as a result of the costs and needed scale of production required by these methods, and are claimed to result in food that is devoid of nutritional and health-giving qualities.

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