Food Import and Export

The first meal that I chose is a typical lunch for me which is a simple chicken salad with ranch dressing. The first ingredient and most common ingredient in most salads is lettuce. Most of the commercial lettuce sold in the United States comes from the Imperial Valley area of southern California (answers.com). The second ingredient is onions which are also grown and distributed here in the US. California led the nation in onion production in 2010 producing 18.8 million hundredweight (agricultural research marketing center)! The third ingredient in my salad is cucumber. While I was unable to identify exactly where the cucumbers that I buy come from, I have learned that China is responsible for 60% of the global output of cucumbers (food and agricultural organization of the United Nations). For the sake of this paper I’m going to assume that the particular cucumbers that I purchased for my salad were grown in and imported from China. The fourth ingredient in my salad is chicken. My research shows that my chicken most likely came from a commercial chicken farm in the southern United States. The worlds largest chicken exporters are Brazil and the US (agriculture and agri-food Canada). Finally I top off my salad with a delicious Kraft ranch dressing. The back of the bottle says that it was produced in Northfield Illinois.

The second meal outlined in this paper is one of my favorite dinners, beef stroganoff. The first ingredient is a beef roast. 95% of the beef consumed in the United States is raised here in the US (Embassy of the United States Seoul Korea). The top 5 producing states are Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and South Dakota (Answers.com). The next two ingredients are Campbells mushroom soup and beef consume. Campbells distributes its products form Camden New Jersey (Wikipedia). The fourth ingredient in my dinner is Lipton Beefy onion mix. The Us Lipton manufacturer is located in Kentucky (Lipton.com). The final ingredient is rice....