Throughout this blog, each post focused on a specific part of fossil fuel consumption in relation to my meals. My breakfast post focused on the food and ingredients, while my lunch post focused on the packaging of the meal, and finally dinner was about challenging myself to have an as environmentally friendly meal as possible.
In each post I learned how incredibly fossil fuel dependent our planet is. In the US, there is an average of “about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy used for every calorie of food energy it produces.[13]” Accounting for just the lunch and breakfast I ate, this average indicates that I used a minimum of 12,600 calories of fossil fuel energy. “At the turn of the century, oil scarcely mattered at all,” but as technology improved society became more and more dependent on this natural resource, dawning a new age of dependence [14]. As we can see from the past, this dependency will only become more intense and if changes aren’t made soon we will either run out of fossil fuels or destroy our environment in the process.
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[13] Manning, Richard. The Oil We Eat, Harper’s Magazine, (Feb 2004): 37-45
[14] Manning, Richard. The Oil We Eat, Harper’s Magazine, (Feb 2004): 37-45