For dinner, I actually assembled my own meal. Bread, ham, cheese, grilled on a non-stick frying pan so I would not have to use extra butter or oils to cook it. The bread is made by “D’Italiano,” marble cheese by Kraft and the Ham was cut by my local Save-On Foods store. Ingredients in the bread included enriched wheat flour, water, yeast, sugar/glucose, fructose, potato flour, salt, vegetable oil (soybean and/or canola), wheat gluten, defatted soya flour, calcium propionate, sodium stearoyl-2-lactylate, and monoglycerides. From Manning’s article, I know that it costs about “seventy calories to make one calorie of pork,” which is a lot more than  “about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy used for every calorie of food energy it produces” (13). This made me wonder again if I should truly start eating local, organic, non-processed producer foods, this would help contribute to reducing energy usage for foods. Then again, those foods are less convenient and a lot more expensive! Once again, I ate at home so no packaging waste was required for the preparation and consumption of my dinner. The bread and cheese came in a plastic bag which would have used energy to make. The ham was sliced from Save- On Foods and put in a paper bag. In high school, there was a fad about the environmental friendliness of brown paper bags, I wonder how truthful that fad is. From this blog, I have learnt that everything requires oil and energy to make. Gone are the days where humans would depend on planting seeds into the soil and use irrigation systems to grow our food or catching wild game. Now everything is industrialized and very inefficient. Inefficient usage of land, different chemical fertilizers from phosphate to nitrogen, heavy processing of the raw foods, and very little local or organic consumption. This is because our demands for food that are big in quantity and lasts long outweigh our concern for our planet and her resources. There is a lack of education and power in our people to make things more efficient and less oil reliant.

Manning, Richard. Harper’s Magazine 308.1845 (Feb 2004): 37-45.

For lunch, I dropped by for a quick meal at White Spot, a local BC restaurant that claims to purchase over 675,000 pounds of tomatoes, almost 5,000,000 pounds of potatoes and 73,000 pounds of blueberries from BC producers. I had their classic burger, coleslaw salad and fries knowing that nearly 5 million pounds of potatoes used to make White Spot’s fries each year are all supplied by BC producers. The burgers have a quarter pound of beef along with lettuce, tomato and the restaurant’s signature sauce. White Spot president Warren Erhart claims that “almost 50 per cent of White Spot’s ingredients, from tomatoes to potatoes, are locally sourced and we are proud to support the producers that grow delicious food right in our own backyard.” According to Richard Manning, when talking about energy and calories a “factor of ten applies to each level up the food chain.” Although eating animal meat may contribute to enormous wastages of energy, vegetarians eating processed foods would not be faring much better in terms of saving energy. This has been discussed in my previous post about processed ingredients in foods such as milk and cereal. It can be concluded that eating organic, unprocessed food would be the best choice. Eating at a restaurant means that once again, my plate, fork, knives were reusable and not contributing to energy wastage from packaging. I would assume that the unknown bread brand White Spot uses is also highly processed. The beef, though Canadian is also very inefficient in terms of energy uses. “Feedlots,” for raising cows for food is described by Richard Manning as wasteful because “it exhales methane, a global-warming gas. It pollutes streams. It takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef this way.

https://www.whitespot.ca/news/latest-news/white-spot-celebrates-bc-new-summer-menu-and-wine-list

THE OIL WE EAT Manning, Richard. Harper’s Magazine 308.1845 (Feb 2004): 37-45.

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.