MNN - Mother Nature Network

Get your occasional piece of steak from a local, organic farmer who feeds his cows only grass, and your baked potatoes from an organic CSA? Then “From Pasture to Plate,” an interactive graphic from News 21, doesn’t refer to you so much. But if you’re ordering a steak-and-baked-potato dinner at Sizzler or buying conventional stuff at a supermarket, the graphic will get you thinking.

 

 

Click on the items from an innocuous-looking, typical dinner — steak, potato, side salad and Coke — and you’ll find out where fossil fuels enter into the creation of these common items. Steak, for example, isn’t all that carbon intensive at the young-calf-eating-grass stage. It’s just that the rest of the making of the steak — from the calf going to the GMO corn-y feedlot to the mechanized killing plant to the supermarkets in cellophane — is extremely fuel intensive.

 

 

A lot of the information in this graphic — i.e. the fact that a lot of fossil fuels are used to make fertilizer, for example — won’t be new info to most MNN readers. But the graphic does pull all the disparate points of data together and put it in an easy-to-digest visual format. Click and learn.