The oil in your oatmeal

The oil in your oatmeal
A lot of fossil fuel goes into producing, packaging and shipping our breakfast
Chad Heeter
Sunday, March 26, 2006

Please join me for breakfast. It's time to fuel up again.

On the table in my small Berkeley apartment this morning is a healthy-looking little meal -- a bowl of imported McCann's Irish oatmeal topped with Cascadian Farms organic frozen raspberries, and a cup of Peet's Fair Trade Blend coffee. Like most of us, I prepare my breakfast at home, and the ingredients for this one probably cost me about $1.25. (If I went to a cafe in downtown Berkeley, I'd probably have to add $6 more, plus tip, for the same.)

My breakfast fuels me up with about 400 calories, and it satisfies me. So for just over a buck and half and an hour spent reading the morning paper in my own kitchen, I'm energized for the next few hours. But before I put spoon to cereal, what if I consider this bowl of oatmeal porridge (to which I've just added a little butter, milk and a shake of salt) from a different perspective. Say, a Saudi Arabian one.

Then what you'd be likely to see -- what's really there, just hidden from our view (not to say our taste buds) -- is about 4 ounces of crude oil. Throw in those luscious red raspberries and that cup of java (an additional 3 ounces of crude), and don't forget those modest additions of butter, milk and salt (1 more ounce), and you've got a tiny bit of the Middle East right here in my kitchen.

snip...
What they've discovered is astonishing. According to researchers at the University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Agriculture, an average of more than 7 calories of fossil fuel is burned up for every calorie of energy we get from our food. This means that in eating my 400-calorie breakfast, I will, in effect, have consumed 2,800 calories of fossil fuel energy. (Some researchers claim the ratio is as high as 10 to 1.)


more...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/03/26/ING3PHRU681.DTL

Imagine what most of us would have to do for food without that "hidden" fossil fuel energy subsidy?

Should I give up eating?

Maybe the lesson learned is: Think globally, eat locally.

I often complain to myself how long it takes to fix my meals, yet I hate eating out (for several reasons). On reading this article I realized just how valuable it was for one of my grandmothers -- back in the days when wives stayed at home -- spent cooking and canning the vegetables from their own garden. IMO, our society has replaced this with a much busier and more wasteful lifestyle. I think this article will at the very least serve for me as a reminder to conserve and focus on the "important things".

It's kind of self-evident, really!

So how do you gauge how much oil went into your food?

First check out how far it traveled. The farther it went, the more oil it required. Next, gauge how much processing went into the food. A fresh apple is not processed, but Kellogg's Apple Jacks cereal requires enormous amounts of energy to process. The more processed the food, the more oil it requires. Then consider how much packaging is wrapped around your food. Buy fresh vegetables instead of canned, and buy bulk beans, grains, and flour if you want to reduce that packaging.

You may think you're in the clear because you eat strictly organically grown foods. When it comes to fossil-fuel calculations though, that isn't relevant. However it is grown, a raspberry is shipped, packed and chilled the same way.

There is some energy savings in growing organically, but it's probably slight. According to a study by David Pimentel at Cornell University, 30 percent of fossil-fuel expenditure on farms growing conventional (nonorganic) crops is found in chemical fertilizer.

This 30 percent is not consumed on organic farms, but only if the manure used as fertilizer is produced very close to the farm. Manure is a heavy, bulky product. If farms have to truck bulk manure more than a few miles, the savings is eaten up in diesel-fuel consumption, according to Pimentel. ....

It's not quite that bad with regard to the oatmeal.

The seven calories of fossil fuel to an average food calorie is just that, and average. Far more fossil fuel calories--probably by a factor of at least seven go into producing meats, particularly grain fed meats.

Why for your oatmeal you might well have only consumed about 400 fossil fuel calories . . .

......what happens to the living things?

And everything else.

A typical vegetable moves 1500 miles to get onto your grocer's shelf.

Now keep thinking. Deeper. What did it take to make this? What did it take to ship this? Does it have petroleum in it?

Here's one we discussed in a high level thermodynamics course- the amount of fuel it takes to produce FUEL.

I moved last year and missed out on getting my produce delivery every week. I've got to get back on that list. Thanks for the reminder.

http://www.localharvest.org/

Be sure to check out the heirloom seed dept too!

http://www.localharvest.org/store/vegetable-seeds.jsp


:kick:

Thanks! Found some places real close to me that I didn't know about.

Thanks Again!

I crossposted this in Peak Oil Forum. This is very relevant!

The local food movement really excites me. Not only can it remedy this "oil in the food" problem, but it has the potential to bolster local economies and small farmers. Lots of people are turning to CSAs and farmer's markets. Did you know that most grocery stores won't even accept produce from local small farmers? As I understasnd, it's because they have very big contracts with very big agribiz companies, (the ones that ship the food all over the world) and don't want to bother with the little guys. There's just something very, very wrong with the fact that you can't buy a local piece of fruit from your local grocery store. (At least not often.)

I grow a lot of my own food and barter for a lot of the rest of it with others who do the same. I'm a little crazy about the whole local-natural-food thing. I see a yard as a bit of a waste of space....think of all the fruits and veggies you could grow in place of all that grass and privet hedge! :) How I wish we had a CSA around here. I hope local food is going to be the trend of the future.

And the "peak oil" issue is about the oil in your oil. When it takes more to get it out of the ground than you get out of the ground, then you can't use it to run your car or grow your food anymore.

The Oil We Eat
Following the food chain back to Iraq
Posted on Friday, July 23, 2004. Originally from Harper's Magazine, February 2004. By Richard Manning.

The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.—Balzac

The journalist’s rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We’ll follow the energy.

We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don’t get something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.

more at link: http://www.harpers.org/TheOilWeEat.html