Breakfast!

To begin my day I had a bowl of Vector.  Simply put, this is cereal accompanied by milk.

Alright, here we go, ingredients in the cereal: rice, whole grain wheat, sugar/glucose-fructose, soy protein, whole grain oats, vegetable oil, brown sugar syrup, rice flour, salt…. are we done yet?…. vegetable oil shortening, honey, barley malt syrup, molasses, cinnamon, soy lecithin, citric acid …. I left out a lot more as I’m sure you see the point by now.  Its surprising to think that so many ingredients go into making such a simple and delicious food.  Each ingredient is often produced by a different company, or mass production factory and shipped to ‘vector headquarters’ for further processing.  You’d think that one factory consuming and polluting should be more than enough to produce a cereal, but specialization and mono-culture allows for farms and facilities to produce extreme amounts of these ingredients and still turn over a profit.

The same can be said for milk, as in previous era’s farmers grew the feed for the cows, or allowed them to graze freely among the fields.  Grazing cows equals time and money spent on preserving their lands.  Buying feed is an more efficient way to nurture cows, but it requires another factory consuming fossil fuels and producing pollution to manufacture this food.  Importing feed and inputs for farming is how farms are able to stay in one location, whereas “our ancestors found it preferable to pluck the energy from the ground and when it ran out move on.[5]”

Each factory, farm or facility has its own carbon footprint and consumption of fossil fuels.  The more ingredients there are, the more inefficient the production is.  We’ll take a closer look at the main ingredient in this meal, whole grain wheat.  To produce wheat there is a lengthy process involved. There is harvesting, which requires large tractors plowing the fields and collecting the wheat plants.  Next is preparing, then cleaning, then tempering, then gristing, and finally milling.  Milling is the next fossil fuel intensive step as heavy machinery is required to power rollers that flattens and break down the wheat into small pieces.  In the comments below there is a link to a video showing how wheat is farmed on a large scale. Think about how much fossil fuel energy is required to prepare this ingredient for Vector, now times it by ten to account for the other ingredients.  By now it should be blatantly obviously that an excessive amount of fossil fuels is needed to make these ingredients.  After hearing these processes it shouldn’t be a bit of a surprise that “humans take 40 percent of the globes primary productivity every year.[6]”

I consumed approximately 2 cups of vector and 300 mL of milk for this meal.  Using the nutritional facts from both the milk and vector box I calculated my calorie intake to be approximately 510 calories.   It can be estimated that 2040 calories of fossil fuel energy was required to produce my breakfast.  Had I not been in a rush to get to work I would have ate more..

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[4] flickr. “Vector Cereal.”  http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035720546@N01/3333690032/in/photostream/

[5] Manning, Richard. The Oil We Eat, Harper’s Magazine, (Feb 2004): 37-45

[6] Manning, Richard. The Oil We Eat, Harper’s Magazine, (Feb 2004): 37-45