For breakfast, I started off with a quick bowl of milk and Kellogg’s Froot Loop Cereal. On their website,  Kellogg’s claim that Froot Loops are prepared “simply, in a method similar to a house kitchen- just on a larger scale with” to which I am very skeptical of. The ingredients listed on the box is include sugar, corn flour blend (whole grain yellow corn flour, degerminated yellow corn flour), wheat flour, whole grain oat flour, oat fiber, soluble corn fiber, contains 2% or less of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (coconut, soybean and/or cottonseed), salt, red 40, natural flavor, blue 2, turmeric color, yellow 6, annatto color, blue 1, BHT for freshness along with a list of vitamins of minerals including: Vitamin C (sodium ascorbate and ascorbic acid), niacinamide, reduced iron, zinc oxide, vitamin B6 (pyridoxine hydrochloride), vitamin B2 (riboflavin), vitamin B1 (thiamin hydrochloride), vitamin A palmitate, folic acid, vitamin D, vitamin B12. I am already very bewildered by the amount of ingredients and the fact that I am unable to annunciate most of them. According to the Kellogg’s website, the corn is from Nebraska, rice from Louisiana, wheat from Canada while the company pledges to work closely with local farmers in a mutually beneficial manner. This means that my breakfast had to travel thousands of kilometers as a agricultural product to factories where they are processed into edible material before they arrive at the Kellogg’s plant. Then after being packaged in plastic and cardboard boxes my breakfast would have to arrive at the market where I would have to drive to and from to make the purchase. This wastes an incredible amount of oil and energy because every raw agricultural product had to be processed in factories before shipping. The worker’s oil usage along with the energy taken up by the land should also be accounted for. The milk is produced by Dairyland, Canada. Given that they have very little information about their product on their website, I can only speculate that it is heavily processed milk with non-natural cow raising and milking cycle. My family buys big packs of cereal and store them in big metal containers so I did not actually waste any packaging for my breakfast. The bowl and utensils for breakfast were also reusable. According to Richard Manning, in America, “agriculture is not about food; it’s about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy to become food.” This means that the nation’s most abundant agricultural product corn, is not meant to be consumed merely for food calories. The processed corn in my cereal also include the amount used to sweeten the cereal through high-fructose corn sweeteners.  It is a scary thought about how dependent North America is on the production and consumption of corn, “grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces” (Manning).

http://www.kelloggs.ca/en_CA/the-goodness-of-grains/from-seed-to-spoon.htmlTHE OIL WE EAT Manning, Richard. Harper’s Magazine 308.1845 (Feb 2004): 37-45.