Are We Fracking Our Food Supply?

06 Dec, 2012

by Susan Enfield via, NewHope360

When I think about frack­ing, I think about water—the chemical-laced water that’s shot into wells to frac­ture shale and release fos­sil fuels, and which reap­pears both above and below ground, where it’s been linked to envi­ron­men­tal con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and health prob­lems in humans and animals.

But increas­ingly, frack­ing activ­ity is affect­ing neigh­bor­ing farms and ranches and the foods they produce—foods we may be eating—reports a recent cover story in The Nation mag­a­zine. In the densely pop­u­lated area around New York State, sci­ence writer Elizabeth Royte reports, the bur­geon­ing local food move­ment is grow­ing anx­ious about how frack­ing may affect their food­shed, which coin­cides with the nat­ural gas–rich Marcellus Shale formation.

Food inde­pen­dence vs. energy independence?

In the Northeast, com­pe­ti­tion for “nat­ural resources” is heat­ing up, accord­ing to the arti­cle. “Only recently has the Northeast’s local-foods move­ment reached a crit­i­cal mass, to the point where col­leges and cater­ers trip over them­selves in the quest for locally sourced and sus­tain­ably grown prod­ucts. (New York has the fourth-highest num­ber of organic farms in the nation.)

But the movement’s lofty ideals could turn out to be, in shale-gas areas, a double-edged sword. “People at the farm­ers’ mar­ket are start­ing to ask exactly where this food comes from,” says Stephen Cleghorn, a Pennsylvania goat farmer.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at NewHope360.

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