Hey everyone and welcome to our Environmental Pollution blog! Welcome to Foodrophication, where we blog about how our main topic — Food, from Seed to Table, causes environmental and health impacts in unique ways!
This is Wen Hong and Linying, we are both year 2 geography students, currently involved in the module of Environmental Pollution. As Singaporeans, we love our food and take good food as an essential part of life. However, it seems that many people rarely give a thought to the huge operations that take place behind serving our favorite plate of Chicken Rice or Fish n Chips. As such, when it comes to pollution, being the ‘foodies’ we are, we instantly thought of writing about food pollution!
The word “trophic” is defined broadly as nutrition. Our intention is to show that food, though being the main provision of nutrients to living things, yet also, feeds pollution that plagues our planet and even human health.
The photograph attached above shows how agriculture practices can be sustainable. In the above case, the wasabi plants are being grown along a river in Japan, where the farmers provide the purest water, uncontaminated and all-natural for the plants to grow (Fig. 1). Thus, creating a produce that is sustainable and something they can be proud of. However, this practice is a far cry from what is happening in the real world, as farmers utilize all forms of “boosters” to achieve the greatest yield – that is at the expense of our ecosystem.
Therefore, we hope to learn more about the food that we put on our plates, through this blog where we investigate how the broad topic of food, from planting and packaging to eating and wasting, causes problems for both our environment and our health.
As such, let our adventure begin as food detectives and investigate about food pollution!
Food Detectives Out and See you soon!!
Wen Hong & Linying
References:
Shimamura, N. (2009, June 2). The Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research. Retrieved from https://www.tkfd.or.jp/en/research/detail.php?id=251
Fig. 1 Daio Wasabi Farm in Japan. Obtained from: https://japancheapo.com/travel/daio-wasabi-farm-everything-ever-wanted-know-wasabi/
