Environmentalism and food

If you haven't listened to it already, you should download today's Fresh Air, on carbon footprints of food. The abstract:

Fresh Air from WHYY, February 20, 2008:

That guilty feeling after a big meal might be about more than calories and cholesterol. New Yorker science and technology writer Michael Specter joins Fresh Air to explain how carbon emissions released during food production are having an impact on the environment.

Calculating carbon output is a complex, if not counterintuitive, process, Specter says. In the February 25 issue, he writes about the difficulties of measuring carbon footprints in an article titled "Big Foot: In Measuring Carbon Emissions, it's Easy to Confuse Morality and Science."

Specter was formerly The New York Times' Moscow bureau co-chief, and before that the national science reporter for The Washington Post.