Today I watched a David Attenborough documentary with Dad. It was about the 6th mass extinction, which we are in the middle of right now. I learnt about how one million of the eight million plants and animals on the planet today are endangered of going extinct. I also learnt about over-farming of beef, over-fishing of the oceans, and how scientists have traced all modern diseases back to human activity using maps of trade routes and paths food takes from producer to consumer.
Throughout the documentary, these messages were shared by different scientists doing research on mass extinction and the modern day impact on biodiversity. Biodiversity is the population of many living organisms of different species living in a habitat of non living organisms. Biodiversity is important because it sustains the food chain, from the smallest plant right up to the biggest animal, plant, or the human.
Buying locally sourced food would mean we know where our food is coming from and we would reduce our food miles. Part of the documentary was emphasizing that the UK used to grow a lot of its food on its own and then when the Paris Agreement came into place, and rules on producing food became more strict, the UK and Europe moved the places they were sourcing the food further afield in an attempt to feel better about themselves. Being able to say that they don’t cause problems of over-farming beef or knocking down forests to accommodate for it. However, the documentary also pointed out that by doing this they are actually increasing the amount of population they are creating by having to ship the food from other countries, as well as increasing their populations food miles.
After watching that documentary I was wondering if my family could work a little bit harder to only buy food where we know it is coming from. I want to work on finding and developing recipes so we can use more locally sourced things.
You can find the documentary HERE. (You might need to create a BBC account to watch it. Its free and only takes a couple of minutes.)
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