Jamie Grassby's Blog

My Food Blog

Jamie Grassby

History 106

When I recorded my daily food intake, I wasn’t feeling my best, and it showed with a significantly smaller consumption amount. Normally, my breakfasts would be one of my biggest meals, but in this case, with the condition that I was in and the fact that I had to rush to class to be at, my breakfast consumption was low. Also, by living on residence and eating from a cafeteria, some food items are hard to trace. I tried my best but may not have received all the right ingredients.

Morning:

My breakfast consisted of a Chiquita Bananas and a Five Alive. Chiquita bananas are generally grown in Central and Latin America. Taken from their site, these bananas go through an extensive travelling period. Once they are fully grown, these bananas are refrigerated and sent to its final destination by air. Approximately, if these bananas were to travel from Central America to Vancouver, they would undergo 2000 miles. Their site states that this delivering process takes up to two weeks, before the banana reaches its customers. With the banana peel, I composted it in the cafeteria’s compost.  A banana generally has 100 calories to it.

I washed my banana down with some Five Alive. The Five Alive is a label under the Coca-Cola name. Five Alive’s central manufacturing plant in Canada is located in Toronto, Ontario. The plant is responsible for most Coca-Cola products, such as: Five Alive, Minute Maid, Powerade, Dasani, Fanta, Full Throttle and Coke. The manufacturing plant is roughly 2500 miles away. According to the site coke products travel by plane or truck, and are estimated to be available to customers a week after they are made. Five Alive is a juice known for its fruits and all their drinks contain 5 fruits (hence the five). I was curious as to where these fruits came from, so I investigated their website. Sadly, I wasn’t able to find anything substantial, however, under the Minute Maid products I read that Coke used fruits from the southeast part of America and from several Central American countries. The bottle contained 220 calories and was later recycled.

Lunch:

For Lunch, I stopped at the campus Pizza Pizza to grab a slice of pizza. There I ordered two slices of cheese pizza. They made all of their pizzas freshly in store, but begged the question as to where they go their ingredients. According to their website, the dough that the stores use is made freshly each day. Conversely, the sauce and other ingredients come from their several different warehouses. From what I could find from their site, Pizza Pizza has several different warehouses where ingredients are made and kept. From there, they will distribute the necessary goods to retailers. A piece of cheese pizza has 200 calories.

Snacks:

Throughout the day, I kept myself going on snacks. For Instance, because we are entering into the Easter season I deemed it necessary to pick up some Creme Eggs. These Cadbury chocolates are a seasonal treat and they are manufactured at the Cadbury manufacturing plant located in Toronto, Ontario. Again, the distance was around 2500 miles. I read that for most of their products, the items were trucked to the convenient location. The Creme Eggs as it may already reveal, are not nutritious in any way and contain 170 calories. Considering how high the sugar content is in these eggs, it is conceivable that they make these eggs at the factories. They are packaged in a type of foil that surprisingly may be recycled.

Additionally, throughout the day, I was re-filling my water bottle. Because I was feeling under the weather, I felt it necessary to consume as much water as possible. I must have filled my water bottle over 5 times through several sinks and fountains.

Dinner:

When dinner came around, I was very hungry and indulged myself in some steak with yet again, some more water. This is the part of the food blog that is a little hazy. Because I ate at my cafeteria, a lot of the information of my food’s whereabouts was unknown. When I tried asking the whereabouts, I wasn’t given any worthwhile answers. Because of this, I am going to make some assumptions with my dinner. I was told that the steak was Alberta Beef, which is plausible considering Alberta’s proximity to Vancouver and it’s large market in the beef market. With that said the distance between the two cities is around 700 miles by truck. With beef, there is a fairly short period between the killing of the cow and it being on the shelf. The beef must also be frozen and transported from the farm.  The cow must have been raised to an appropriate age, before it is slaughtered. This period of the cow’s growth costs the farmer a lot of resources and money. An average sized steak contains around 250 calories depending on the cut.

When looking back at my day’s consumption, there are several interesting facts surrounding it. I was shocked to see how much my food has travelled to eventually reach me. Looking at all my foods together, they travelled over 7500 miles to reach me. In addition, if we were to consider Pollan’s comparison of 1 calorie of food to 10 calories of fossil fuels, I would have used 9500 calories of fossil fuels in one day. This seems absolutely enormous, especially considering that the day I measured my food consumption, I did not eat a lot due to my sickness. This study has really opened my eyes to buying local foods, and how hard it really is! From now on, I will definitely be keeping my eyes open to where my foods comes from and how much energy, money and resources were needed to reach its final destination.

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