This is my food blog for what I ate yesterday. I am going to document the role of oil in its production.
Breakfast: A piece of white bread toast from a Chinese bakery in Vancouver.
Since the bakery was close to my house, I walked to buy it, using NO oil, creating NO greenhouse emissions, and getting some exercise. Yay! Good start!
(photo by breezytoo from food.com)
I have no idea what ingredients this particular brand of white bread uses. However, a search on allrecipes.com shows that a Traditional White Bread recipe contains:
2 (.25 ounce) packages of active dry yeast
3 tablespoons of white sugar
2 1/2 cups of warm water
3 tablespoons of lard
1 tablespoon of salt
6 1/2 cups bread flour
Concentrating on white sugar, sucrose.com tells us that sugar is produced in 121 countries with approximately 70% made from sugar cane and 30% from sugar beets.
(image by sucrose.com)
I’m currently uncertain whether my tasty white bread got it’s sugar from cane or beets, but it is clear from the above picture that it likely wasn’t produced in Canada. Out of the many blue and red dots in the above picture, only one blue dot is situated in the middle of Canada, far away from Vancouver.
Further research has led me to sugar.ca, where I learn that 90% of our sugar is made from cane and is mainly imported from South America, Central America and Australia. As an example, I’ll take capital cities from each of these places and calculate the distance and amount of oil used in its transport.
Using the capital Venezuela for South America, it takes 4339.91 miles to travel from Venezuela to Vancouver (mapcrow.info) According to Boeing, a 747 will consume 19 L of oil per mile. Therefore, at the very minimum it would take 82 458.29 L of oil to get the sugar from Venezuela to Vancouver. Ouch! And this is only one ingredient in my bread’s list.
Next is Central America, taking Mexico as an example, the distance between here and Mexico is 2145.52 miles (mapcrow.info). At least this is better than Venezuela. It’ll take 40 764.88 L of oil, less than half of Venezuela’s total.
Last, I’ll use Sydney for Australia. The distance is an astounding 7761.42 miles (mapcrow.info)! I don’t even need to calculate to know this is the worst, but if you want to know it’s 147 466.98 L of oil. Let’s hope the sugar came from Mexico and continue on.
Unfortunately, the travel is not yet complete. After arriving at the airport, the sugar still needed to be transported to large business owners and local supermarkets. Using large commercial transport trucks to transport goods easily from place to place reins in at a average of 32.2 miles per gallon (truecostblog.com). To convert that into litres, an additional 122 L of oil are used per mile of driving. The distance from the Vancouver Airport to Metrotown in Burnaby is around 29 miles. (I’ll guess that the bakery might have bought the sugar here as it is a well-known place and has a T&T which is a popular Chinese supermarket.) Therefore, in additional to the flight oil used in each of the possible three locations, we add an additional 4756 L of oil used to deliver the sugar to Metrotown.
All this math has made me rather tired so I think I’ll move on to other aspects of oil in production and leave out the math. Safe to say, the amount used is HUGE and rather difficult to imagine. It’s difficult enough for me to contemplate how much oil is in 1000 L, much less 10 000 L and more. After a while, the numbers simply become statistical numbers and lose meaning as it is difficult to physically understand the large quantities of oil used.
In order to eat the bread, I toasted it in a white and silver T-Fal Avante toaster.
(image found at products.howstuffworks.com)
It works and was relatively cheap, plus my old toaster was broken so I needed a new one. That was all I thought about when I bought it. However, to contemplate the amount of oil that was used to create this product, I would imagine that oil would have been used to heat up and work the machines which bent and moulded different metals into the small parts of the toaster including the grill, screws, and other internal parts. An designer or engineer would have needed to be hired to design the blueprint and structure of the toaster using oil in the production of paper and electricity as the design was likely completed on computer.
Finally, I myself used electricity to power my toaster. However, luckily as I live in Vancouver, I used BC Hydro which provides relatively green electricity for the city. BC Hydro has 30 hydroelectric facilities and three natural gas-fuelled thermal power plants (Wikipedia.org) The hydroelectric facilities are powered by water dams across BC while the natural gas power plants use a naturally occurring hydrocarbon gas mixture consisting mainly of methane and other hydrocarbons. This does produce small amounts of carbon dioxide emissions, but is still better than other more carbon-intensive fossil fuels.
To finally finish up my breakfast, I enjoyed a cup of Tetley’s Orange Pekoe Tea flavoured with milk and Splenda.
(image by Tetley at Steepster.com)
From Tetley’s own website, I learned that black teas such as orange pekoe come from either China or India in the Assam region. I’ll leave you free to do your own math if you wish, but put simply, orange pekoe tea is not produced in any region in North America and requires long transportation for North Americans to enjoy. Just this simple fact is interesting because it brings forth the increasing globalization of the world.
I had no idea that orange pekoe was produced nowhere in North America. Without air travel, I would be limited not only in my global physical sphere, but in the very quantity and quality of goods I would be able to acquire. Even a simple tea bag from the supermarket which I thought to be a very commercial and Americanized (true tea connoisseurs would probably turn up their noses at using a tea bag, but many of us prefer speed to quality), was in fact a notably Asian product produced in only two parts of the world.
Splenda is made from sugar which I outlined above as an ingredient of white bread.
(image from proteinpower.com)
However, Splenda is different from normal white sugar as it has no calories, yet retains a sweet taste when added to food and drinks. In order to achieve this effect, atoms in sucrose molecule (sugar) are moved around to create sucralose which is not absorbed by the body (drgourmet.com). Thus, sucralose has no calories.
Unfortunately, while there are no calories in Splenda, there is additional oil used in its production. Since sucralose/Splenda does not exist in its natural form in nature, it has to be created by human processing in a factory. Some health concerns have risen on whether the use of artificial sugars such as Splenda should be stopped as they are dangerous to human health. However, no major problems have arisen so far and the use of artificial sugars is extremely prominent especially in diet soft drinks.
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Lunch: For lunch I brought a sandwich from home consisting of white bread, roast beef. and pickles.
(image from simonfoodfavourites.blogspot.com)
The bread was the same bread I ate in the morning. The roast beef was from a nearby deli, part of a grocery store. I’m starting to feel grateful that I usually get my food from nearby places considering the amount of oil that already goes into the production of my food, before I have even added to it. Judging from the smallness of the deli, it is unlikely that the meat was prepared on-hand. Instead, my meat first moved from the farm to a slaughterhouse and then to a secondary production factory where it was cooked, wrapped and transported to the deli who sliced the large slab of beef into thin slices for my sandwich.
The main food crop for domesticated farm animals is corn which was likely produced through large amounts of oil in its manufacturing by fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, and other heavy machinery. It is unlikely that the cow my roast beef had a great life as manufacturing standards have created conditions which include standing leg-deep in their own waste and becoming nutritionally deficient as their stomachs were developed to digest grass not corn which is the national standard (Pollan 12).
Although Pollan reveals the horrors of the meat production industry, he does not condemn it entirely revealing that it also takes a large amount of oil to produce crops and that turning vegetarian may not be the perfect cure for the environment as claimed by some vegetarians (Pollan 25). Instead Pollan appreciates a moderate sustainable farm where animals are treated with care and respect and not considered simply commodities in a business transaction (Pollan 25).
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Bus Ride Home: During my bus ride, I get hungry and reach in my bag for a Mini Kit Kat Bar before I head to the mall.
(photo from LeShop.ch)
Ingredients in a Kit Kat bar include:
milk chocolate (sugar, modified milk ingredients, cocoa butter, unsweetened chocolate, lactose, soya lecithin, polyglycerol polyricinoleate, artificial flavours)
wheat flour
sugar
hydrogenated soybean oil or modified palm oil
unsweetened chocolate
sodium bicarbonate
soya lecithin
yeast
artificial flavour
It’s a long list and strangely artificial flavour comes up twice. I’ll assume that if its artificial enough not to have its own name, it requires even more processing by machines and humans to produce it using oil. Kit Kat is a popular brand from the larger Nestlé corporation. Exploration of Nestlé’s webpage leads me to a brochure entitled The Nestlé Canada Environmental Sustainability Report 2008 (nestle.ca). Here I find various information about Nestlé’s attempts to help the environment and provide a more sustainable way of producing and transporting its goods (nestle.ca).
Statistics about Nestlé’s progress include a decrease in energy consumption from 4.9% between 2006-7 and a decrease in greenhouse gas production of 11% (nestle.ca). The rest of the brochure contains many bright colourful images and additional information about the different ways Nestlé is helping to give back to the environment. The brochure is clearly a public relations ad aimed at attracting more consumers to their product, but it is strangely effective. At a time when greenhouse gases and energy consumption seems to be rising everywhere, just breaking even seems quite difficult. To be able to decrease energy consumption and greenhouse gases is a great achievement.
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Dinner/Snacks: In the evening I hungrily devoured some rice, Chinese sausage, mushrooms, and chicken.
Later, I also consume some Goldfish crackers and A&W Diet Root Beer.
(images by pepperridgefarms.com and candyland.ie)
I’ll quickly run through Goldfish crackers and Root Beer together as their production is similar to what I’ve mentioned before. High processing in factories, injection of artificial flavours which need to be artificially produced, and import of natural foods from far-off nations. All of these factors require a huge amount of oil even before it is transported to the supermarket. Their selling point is that they both require no further cooking (meaning that for lazy people like me they can be consumed straight from the box or can) and that they are relatively cheap.
As we still have enough oil and money to produce our manufactured food products right now, the actual cost of manual labour can easily be pushed off in factories in third-world countries where labour is cheap. However, when oil becomes scarce, it will affect not only our transportation needs, but many of the daily foods and goods we use and take for granted. While Root Beer may not appear to have any oil in it (drinking oil is certainly not delicious), oil is used in the machines which produce the ingredients in root beer, in the production of its metal can, and in the large amount of transport throughout its production.
The rice dish I ate was home-made and consisted of many different ingredients stir-fried together in soy sauce.
(image from en.petitchef.com)
I’m not entirely sure how it was made since I didn’t cook it, but I’ll focus on the chicken in the dish.
(image from DrawingCoach.com)
Focusing on the YouTube video: Is this Chicken Local? I found it funny how far you have to go to if you want to dig deep and discover if your food is local and sustainably produced. The beginning question of the environmentalist couple asking if the chicken was organic and locally produced seemed like a logical thoughtful question to ask before consuming meat.
Further enquiries, also brought up questions that should be considered such as whether the chicken was treated humanely by having space to wander around and if the owner was actually known for supporting organic produce or simply using the term “organic” as a trend to gain more money. This point was also brought up by Pollan in “Mass Natural“ as he explored the consequences of Wal-Mart going organic and whether this was in fact an ironic manufacturing scheme by the world’s biggest manufacturer of goods or that appreciation for organic products had now become more mainstream and popular, instead of a small grassroots community.
This video was extremely effective as not only did it bring up serious questions about our food that should be considered, it was presented in an extremely entertaining and humorous way. If the same information was simply portrayed as statistics or written in a formal report, many people would have ignored it and quickly forgotten its importance. By integrating important social issues into entertaining mass media, the public is more willing to watch, listen, and contemplate their own solutions to environmental issues.
Works Cited
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“Boeing: Commercial Airplanes – 747 Fun Facts.” The Boeing Company. Boeing. Web. 9 Mar. 2012. <http://www.boeing.com/commercial/747family/pf/pf_facts.html>.
“Canadian Sugar Institute – Industry Statistics.” Canadian Sugar Institute. Canadian Sugar Institute. Web. 9 Mar. 2012. <http://www.sugar.ca/english/canadiansugarindustry/industrystatistics.cfm>.
CandyLand. A&W Diet Root Beer. American Drinks & Sodas. CandyLand. Web. 8 Mar. 2012.
Danialle. “Traditional White Bread Recipe – Allrecipes.com.” Allrecipes.com Canada. Web. 9 Mar. 2012. <http://allrecipes.com/recipe/traditional-white-bread/detail.aspx>.
Eades, Michael R.. Splenda. Splenda misinformation. The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D.. Web. 8 Mar. 2012.
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Gilmore, Gay and Breezytoo. White Bread. 2007. Food.com, Pacific Northwest. Food.com. Web. 8 Mar. 2012.
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Harlen, Timothy S.. “Ingredients – Splenda.” Eat Healthy and Lose Weight with Healthy Diets and Recipes from Dr. Gourmet. Harley Bros. Production, LLC.. Web. 9 Mar. 2012. <http://www.drgourmet.com/ingredients/splenda.shtml>.
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Leong, Simon. Roast Beef Sandwich. Photography, Kingston, ACT. Simon Food Favourites. Web. 8 Mar. 2012.
Pepperidge Farm. Goldfish Crackers. Our Products. Pepperidge Farm. Web. 8 Mar. 2012.
Portlandia. “Is the chicken local?.” YouTube – Broadcast Yourself. . YouTube, 18 Jan. 2011. Web. 9 Mar. 2012. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErRHJlE4PGI>.
Pollan, Michael. “An Animal’s Place.” The New York Times (2002): The New York Times. Web. 8 Mar. 2012.
“SKIL – Learn How Sugar Is Made.” Sugar Knowledge International Limited SKIL. Sugar Knowledge International. Web. 9 Mar. 2012. <http://www.sucrose.com/learn.html>.
T-Fal Avante Deluxe Stainless-Steel 2-Slice Toaster. ConsumerGuide Products. HowStuffWorks.com. Web. 8 Mar. 2012.
Tami. Fried Rice. Tami’s Kitchen Table Talk, North Carolina. http://en.petitchef.com/recipes/one-pan- pork-fried-rice-fid-1334691. Web. 8 Mar. 2012.
Tetley. Orange Pekoe. Tetley. Steepster. Web. 8 Mar. 2012.
“The Environment | Nestlé Canada.” Nestlé Canada. Nestlé Canada Inc.. Web. 9 Mar. 2012. <http://www.corporate.nestle.ca/en/aboutus/community/Pages/TheEnvironment.aspx>.