Friends that know me well know that I work from Monday to Friday from 8AM to 5PM, and that I’ve given myself the excuse of not having enough time to make breakfast and lunch at home. My daily food consumption practically consists of fast food…and fast food. (I know, it’s not healthy)
To start off the day – I usually visit a local A&W and order their ‘Homestyle Ham N’ Egger’ combo, which includes a breakfast sandwich, small coffee, and a hash brown. The sandwich consists of the following ingredients:
- Whole Wheat Bread
- Ham
- Egg
- Cheese
- Tomatos
During lunch, I’ll usually order a Veggie and Cheese Sandwich from a local Subway store:
- 9-Grain Wheat Bread
- Lettuce
- White Cheese
- Tomatoes
- Green Peppers
- Onions
- Cucumbers
- Lite Mayonnaise
- Salt and Pepper
For dinner, a simple made at home dish – Fettuccine Alfredo:
- Fettuccine Pasta
- Double Cream
- Margarine
- Nutmeg
- Parmesan Cheese
- Black Pepper
In this blog, I’ll review the role of fossil fuel in the production of these food items, separated by each meal. I’ll also be including the whole logistics of it. (Production -> Delivery -> Packaging)
Fossil fuel pla
ys an important role in our daily lives, we use fossil fuel in almost everything – automobiles, food production, farming equipment. In the food we eat, fossil fuel plays almost a complete role from the production to the end user.
Take a look at my breakfast sandwich and Veggie sandwich from A&W and Subway, the bread itself is made from whole wheat, wheat is a cereal grain grown by farmers, who use fossil fuel as a main source of energy for their farming equipment in order to harvest, seed, and refine.
The wheat is then transported into factories that have the necessary machinery equipment to package them for delivery, these equipment often require power from power plants, who uses fossil fuels as a main source of power generation. It is then packaged into plastic bags – which are essentially made from fossil fuels themselves. These packages are then loaded onto couriers, who spend thousands of gallons of gasoline transporting food into the end user itself.