On Sun, 26 Mar 2006 18:24:12 -0800, "Erik A. Mattila"
<eam@nospamimpix.com> wrote:

Captain Compassion wrote:

On 26 Mar 2006 13:30:16 -0800,

Captain Compassion wrote:

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.

Now, let's drill a little deeper into this breakfast. Just where does
this tiny gusher of oil actually come from? (We'll let this oil
represent all fossil fuels in my breakfast, including natural gas and
coal.)

Nearly 20 percent of this oil went into growing my raspberries on
Chilean farms many thousands of miles away, those oats in the fields
of County Kildare, Ireland, and that specially raised coffee in
Guatemala -- think tractors as well as petroleum-based fertilizers and
pesticides.

The next 40 percent of my breakfast fossil-fuel equation is burned up
between the fields and the grocery store in processing, packaging and
shipping.

Take that box of McCann's oatmeal. On it is an inviting image of pure,
healthy goodness: a bowl of porridge, topped by two peach slices.
Scattered around the bowl are a handful of raw oats, what look to be
four acorns and three fresh raspberries. Those raw oats are actually a
reminder that the flakes require a few steps 'twixt field and box. In
fact, a visit to McCann's Web site illustrates each step of cleaning,
steaming, hulling, cutting and rolling that turns the raw oats into
edible flakes. Those five essential steps require significant energy.

Next, my oat flakes go into a plastic bag (made from oil), which in
turn is inserted into an energy-intensive, pressed wood-pulp, printed
paper box. Only then does my breakfast leave Ireland and travel 5,000
fuel-gorging, carbon-dioxide-emitting miles by ship and truck to my
grocery store in California.

Coming from another hemisphere, my raspberries take an even longer
fossil-fueled journey to my neighborhood. Though packaged in a plastic
bag labeled Cascadian Farms (which perhaps suggests birthplace in the
good old Cascade mountains of northwest Washington), the small print
on the back, stamped "A Product of Chile," tells all -- and what it
speaks of is a 5,800-mile journey to Northern California.

If you've been adding up percentages along the way, perhaps you've
noticed that a few tablespoons of crude oil in my bowl have not been
accounted for. That final 40 percent of the fossil fuel in my
breakfast is used up by the simple acts of keeping food fresh and then
preparing it. In home kitchens and restaurants, chilling in
refrigerators and cooking on stoves using electricity or natural gas
gobbles up more energy than you might imagine.

For decades, scientists have calculated how much fossil fuel goes into
our food by measuring the amount of energy consumed in growing,
packing, shipping, consuming and finally disposing of it. The caloric
input of fossil fuel is then compared with the energy available in the
edible product, the caloric output.

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.)

But this is only an average. My cup of coffee gives me just a few
calories of energy, but to process 1 pound of coffee requires more
than 8,000 calories of fossil-fuel energy -- the equivalent energy
found in nearly a quart of crude oil, 30 cubic feet of natural gas or
about 2 1/2 pounds of coal.

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.

One source of manure for organic farmers in California is chicken
producer Foster Farms. Organic farmers in Monterey County, for
example, will truck tons of Foster's manure from their main plant in
Livingston (Merced County) to fields more than 100 miles away.

So the next time we're at the grocer, do we now have to ask not only
where and how a product was grown, but how far its manure was shipped?

Well, if you're in New York City picking out a California-grown tomato
that was fertilized with organic compost made from kelp shipped from
Nova Scotia, maybe it's not such a bad question.

But should we give up on organic? If you're buying organic raspberries

from Chile each week, then yes. The fuel cost is too great, as is the

resulting production of the greenhouse gases.

But if there was truth in packaging, where my oatmeal box now tells me
how many calories I get from each serving, it would also tell me how
many calories of fossil fuels went into the product.

On a scale from one to five -- with one being nonprocessed, locally
grown products and five being processed, packaged imports -- we could
quickly average the numbers in our shopping cart to get a sense of the
ecological footprint of our diet.

What appeared to be my simple, healthy meal of oatmeal, berries and
coffee looks different now. I thought I was essentially driving a
Toyota Prius hybrid by having a very fuel-efficient breakfast, but by
the end of the week, I've eaten the equivalent of more than two quarts
of Valvoline.

From the perspective of fossil-fuel consumption, I now look at my

breakfast as a waste of precious resources. What I eat for breakfast
connects me to the planet, deep into its past with the fossilized
remains of plants and animals which are now fuel, and into the future,
when these nonrenewable resources will probably be in scant supply.

Maybe these thoughts are too grand to be having over breakfast, but
I'm not the only one on the planet eating this morning. My meal
traveled thousands of miles to reach my plate.

Then there's the rise of perhaps 600 million middle-class Indians and
Chinese, already demanding the convenience of packaged meals and
foreign flavors.

What happens when middle-class families in India or China decide they
want their Irish oats for breakfast and topped by organic raspberries

from Chile? They'll dip more and more into the planet's communal oil

well. And someday soon, we'll all suck it dry.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A crude menu
A lot of fossil-fuel energy goes into the production of food:

-- Bowl of oatmeal porridge: 4 ounces of crude oil.

-- Serving of red raspberries: 1 ounce of crude oil.

-- Butter, milk and salt: 1 ounce of crude oil.

-- That cup of java: 2 ounces of crude oil.

-- Energy required to produce 1 pound of coffee: a quart of crude oil,
30 cubic feet of natural gas, or about 2 1/2 pounds of coal.

-- Energy required to produce one week's worth of breakfast for one
person: More than 2 quarts of crude oil.

So......Kommandant, you're finally getting a sense of what's at stake
in the concept of "peak oil"? Maybe Gore and Jimmy Carter weren't so
crazy when they wanted to do something about how we get and use energy,
hmmm? I think every neo-konman should get kicked in the mouth and balls
once or twice a week as a "thank you" gift.

I thought this a good lesson in anal retentiveness. Wonder what my
usual breakfast 2 eggs over easy, loin pork chops, hash browns, OJ and
coffee. If the US had sense to open up ANWR maybe I could up it to 3
eggs.

Hmmm....Cap'n, that's not a breakfast to get anal retentive about - the
less time you keep that inside the better off you are - avoid Dennys.

But I think the story you posted would have made a better point
expressing the whole thing in terms of calories: calories spent and
calories gained. Years ago I read this: traditional (hand) rice growing
in China; one calorie of work produces fifty calories of food. Milpas
(slash and burn) growing in Southern Mexico; one calorie of work
produces 30 calories of food. Mechanized agriculture; 50 calories of
work produces 1 calorie of food.

Traditional food raising techniques leads to slow starvation. Every
year western economies send millions of tons of food produced by
mechanized agriculture to countries that use traditional food raising
techniques.

--
"There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to
whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is
impossible." -- Jack Vance

"Civilizaton is the interval between Ice Ages." -- Will Durant.

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography" -- Ambrose Bierce

"Long term commitment in relationships is only necessary because it takes
so damn long to raise children. Marriage may well be some kind of trick
to keep the males around beyond sexual satiation." -- Captain Compassion

"Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
--Will Durant

Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMverizon.net