Hello fellow student pollution bloggers! I am Justin, a year 4 Life Sciences Major, I’m taking this module as part of my minor in Aquatic Ecology. While life science is generally thought of as biology, to view it in isolation is to ignore the complexity of nature and interplay of between organisms and their environment. – You know what? Heck it (Figure 1). On a less pretentious but equally dramatic note; I realise it’s a rather late time to start on the blog. However, like any good bread dough, the yeast must be given time to work in order for it to rise; similarly, those little neurons have been churning away, allowing ideas to ferment, resulting in lots of hot gas being produced and not much else up till now.

But I’ve had enough of leaving my ideas half-baked. I’ve decided to thoroughly beat into submission my anxiety of forcing every single piece of writing to be ‘perfect’ and ‘clinical’ with a dozen citations that range from actually useful to completely inane (Figure 2). I’m done with being too afraid to show people what I’ve done; or even start for that matter, whenever I think something isn’t ‘good enough’. With this blog, I’m going to write in a way that feels natural to me, and leave You, dear reader, walking away with some shiny new knowledge or maybe some entertainment. Preferably both. For the sake of both current and future me, I hope that as I continue to update this blog, I’ll finally learn the secret behind being able to blend scientific and casual writing in a way that personally feels right. Until then, the only way forward (if I want to pass this module while being true to my way of creative expression) is to throw text at the wall and see what sticks. Fortunately, as seen from the custom URL of this blog, I won’t be affecting anyone else’s grades while I find my groove. To that end I really appreciate the flexibility in tone and topic the blog format affords me.

Just as CFCs slowly corrupts every ozone molecule it touches, this pointless fussing over ‘perfection’ corrupts the ability to comfortably share ideas. So now that I’ve purged the mental equivalent of CFCs from my brain, It’s finally time to get to the meat of the topic. This blog, as its name hopefully implies, focuses on the pollution and its associated effects caused by global food production especially within the agriculture and aquaculture sectors. This is something I’m personally quite invested in: As a fat guy, I eat a lot of food, so food production is a topic close to my heart, especially within my arteries. Jokes aside, as someone who hopes to enter the agricultural research sector, I would be doing myself a disservice if I were to ignore the potential and realised harm that has resulted from trying to feed an increasingly hungry world (Figure 3).

So join me on this journey of discovery, where I will as often as possible (in an attempt to get a good grade for this module while juggling my FYP), gradually degrade both yours and my faith in humanity by showing you the terrible things we’ve done as a species! And with any luck, simultaneously restore some of that lost faith by shedding some light on the silver lining; The incredible efforts made by people around the world to fix the mess we’ve collectively caused. Let’s begin!

 

References

• Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). (2020). Meat and dairy production. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production