Journal #9 Food Intake/Packaging

Each day we eat food that we either make or has been pre-made, but we tend to not read nutritional labels or even realize all the work that went into creating the food we eat on a daily basis. I recorded my intake for 24 hours on Sunday March, 20th:

Breakfast:

3 Large Eggs- 360 calories
2 pieces whole wheat toast – 200 calories
Water bottle oz

Lunch:
1/3 Uno Frozen Pizza =350 calories
Frozen Edamame = 99 calories
Water Bottle 20 oz

Dinner:
20 oz blue Gatorade- 120 calories
2 chicken breasts – about 350 calories
Romaine lettuce – about 20 calories
Zesty Italian dressing - 109 calories

Total Calorie Intake = 1,608

Some of the foods I eat require packaging that creates a lot of waste. The water and Gatorade I drink require plastic bottles, which in return creates 3 bottles of plastic waste on average each day. I do recycle the plastic though so hopefully I am not doing as much damage to the earth as simply throwing the plastic in the trash would. I try to make most of my meals myself but with my busy school and work schedule it makes it hard. Typically my breakfast and dinner and prepared by myself but my lunches are normally pre-made.

In todays time basically everything we purchase comes with some type of packaging whether to make the food last longer on store selves or keep products from becoming damaged before reaching the homes of consumers. Every day I use; about 5 Textbooks, my laptop, my cell phone, my car, my furniture, health products, etc. Each product comes with a receipt of sale which normally is just discarded in the trash. Everything you buy comes with some type of wrapping, even if you buy fresh vegetables and fruits, you still have the bags that you carry them home in. Items such as electronics normally come in boxes within boxes, within plastic, within Styrofoam.I believe a lot of things use unnecessary packaging. Then again we also don't think about how much of our earths precious resources are being wasted on creating all the items used for packaging. My household on three college students produces on average 3-4 large black garbage bags of trash each week. And if you think of that on scale of everyone in the world thats a ton of waste.

Below is an interesting video that I found on youtube that talks about waste and alternative packaging:


All my research on calories was collected from:

http://caloriecount.about.com
http://www.livestrong.org/