“By the fall of 1918, it was clear that a nation’s prosperity, even its very survival, depended on securing a safe, abundant supply of cheap oil.”

-Albert Marrin, Black Gold: The Story of Oil in Our Lives

 

Before actually tracking down the pasta I eat to its producer, it never really struck me how much we use (and hence deplete) oil. On hearing the word oil, first impressions and perceptions usually steer us towards thinking about the oil (petrol and diesel) used in our vehicles (actually I first think of vegetable oil because I am a foodie!). However there is much more to this oil- our dependence on such an extinguishable source is so great that from sowing, packaging and processing of food to its delivery, we cannot do much without oil. The phenomenon has actually been termed as ‘oil addiction’ indicating that now “food is oil”, in the words of Richard Manning in his article The Oil We Eat: Following the Food Chain Back to Iraq.

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Manning, Richard. “The Oil We Eat: Following the Food Chain Back to Iraq.” Harper’s Magazine Feb. 2004: 37-45.

 

The magnitude of this scarcity is more closely understood if we undertake to examine our own food habits and the amount of energy it takes to bring it to our dining tables or rather bring it everywhere- in today’s world food consumption is so high that we are eating almost anytime, anywhere and everywhere! So let me try to unfold this arena of oil consumption by tracking down the journey of my food.

                                                                           

                                                                        Breakfast

 So the breakfast table is laid quite simply with a just a glass of milk. The packaged milk is from an Indian brand called Amul, Asia’s largest milk cooperative that buys milk directly from the farmers. The farmers go with milk cans to local collection centers where milk weighed and paid for immediately. The collection centers send the milk through tankers to the main processing units in the province (each province having atleast one or two plants depending on the size of the province) where it is processed, purified, pasteurized, packaged and then delivered to shops everyday. In this entire process, oil is used at first by farmers in rearing their cattle and then by the processing unit.

By taking simple estimations, we can arrive at the equivalent of fossil fuel used in both the stages. Priced at Rs.50 per litre, only Rs.10 are spent on the entire Amul process including packaging and distribution. I had a chance to visit the Amul factory in Gujarat, India where the company officials told me about this production cost. This information and further details about Amul’s manufacturing process can be found in these two videos- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhGhKVuqdew and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbc1I1Mabpc

A litre of fuel oil costs Rs.80, thus by equivalence the processing cost of Rs.10 amounts to 10/80=1/8 litres of fuel oil for a litre of milk. The balance Rs.40 is paid to farmers; assuming they spend 50 percent of it on cattle feed, by the same analogy, the animals consume 20/80=1/4 litres of fuel oil for a litre of milk. Thus in Manning’s words, 1/4 th litre of the milk I drink is equivalent to drinking (1/4)*(1/4+1/8)= 0.1 litres of oil!

The interesting part is comparison of calorific values- a litre of milk fetches only 2800 KiloJoules while a litre of fuel oil gives roughly 35000 kiloJoules. Thus to earn one calorie from milk, I burden the earth with 35000/2800= 12.5 calories in fuel oil, comparing closely with Manning’s estimate of 1:10.

                                                                                     Lunch

Lunch is not so frugal! I had Indian bread, which is whole-wheat pancakes called ‘chhapatis’, and potato curry with spices, onions, ginger and garlic.

Chapattis

Here the main ingredient is wheat, which is ground and then the flour is mixed with water to make a dough. The dough is rolled into circular pancakes and cooked on a pan. Though readymade wheat flour is available in the market, my mother prefers buying wheat grains and grinding them at home in a powered grinding machine that consumes electricity. The journey of wheat from the farm to my table includes the following stages of energy consumption:

• Production and application of fertilizers
• Land tilling and harvesting using technology and machines
• Sacking and storage
• Transportation to grain market from fields (the wheat grain I buy comes from the province of Uttrakhand which is right next to the province of Uttar Pradesh where I live; a distance of about 600-700km)
• Transportation to retail shops from grain markets
• Travel to shop and back home
• At home- grinding grains into flour and cooking

In the 1960s, India suffered from severe shortage of food and given India’s huge population, death rate was highly escalating. Arable land was limited and demand for food high. Hence, the government opted for the Green Revolution, opting for high yielding seeds and since them Indian farmers are being supplied with subsidized nitrogen based fertilizers costing the national exchequer Rs. 70,586 crores (11.7 billion USD)¹ .

This has made India self sufficient in food production but has downgraded earth’s primary productivity due to increased deforestation and fertilizer pollution.

Taking a similar analogy as in milk, wheat priced at Rs.50/kg (with price sans profit reflecting the manufacturing, processing and delivery costs; prices might not always exactly reflect production costs. However here, for calculation and estimation reasons, prices are assumed to reflect costs) amounts to 0.625 litres of oil per kg of wheat; thus consuming 4 chhapatis (100gm) one consumes 0.0625 litres of oil!

Potato Curry

Potato curry was also prepared with the same spices with ginger, garlic and onions. In India a great variety of vegetables are grown locally in almost all the provinces, thus energy consumption in transportation is greatly reduced as people mostly end up buying what is produced in their province- usually nearby areas of the cities. Vegetable farming is usually done by small individual farmers and not in big commercialized farmlands. Although these farmers do use machines for land tilling, which again requires energy, their need for nitrogen fertilizers (and hence fertilizer pollution and energy consumption) is greatly reduced as legumes fix the nitrogen in the soil. Indian farmers provide almost 30-40 types of legumes (pulse included as they are legumes too), thus replenishing the nitrogen in the soil to quite an extent. However, food demand being so high, need for increased productivity requires subsidized chemical nitrogen fertilizers.

Spices

Apart from onions, ginger and garlic, which usually come from the same vegetable farms, the key ingredients in a curry are the spices. Spices have to be picked by hand and India has cheap labour so picking costs are not that high. However the best and the most spices come from the southern states of India, especially Kerala. Whole spices like cloves, cardamom and cinnamon come from the south, which means high transportation costs. However spices like chili and turmeric grow in almost all provinces of India, again making food consumption very local and reducing oil energy.

                                                                          Dinner

Dinner was again Indian food with boiled basmati rice and Dal that is prepared by boiling the pulses and then adding certain spices fried in oil. Pulses and rice would undergo the same processing and transportation as wheat (mentioned above). Pulses again are legumes, which help fix nitrogen in soil and reduce oil energy used in terms of reduced nitrogen fertilizers used.

Using the same analogy used for milk, the table below estimates the equivalent oil energy consumption of the food I had for lunch and dinner.

Table 1

Food	Price of food	Oil equivalent
4 chappatis (100gm wheat)	Rs.50/kg	0.0625 lit
1 bowl rice (100 gm)	Rs.50/kg	0.0625 lit
1 bowl lentil (140 gm)	Rs.100/kg	0.175 lit
1 bowl potato curry (100gm)	Rs.30/kg (cost reflecting all the ingredients of potato curry included)	0.0375 lit

So consuming a bowl of lentil would be equivalent to consuming 0.175 litres of oil! And that’s just for one meal a day….

The next table shows the calorific value consumptions, in Kilocalories and the ratios of the values. The Kcal values of foods were taken from web. ¹

Fuel oil’s value is 9000 Kcal/lit.

Table 2

Food	Kcal earned	Equivalent Kcal of oil spent (Oil equivalent from table 1/9000 Kcal per lit)	Ratio (Equivalent Kcal of oil spent/ Kcal earned)
4 chappatis (100gm wheat)	340	562.5	1: 1.7
1 bowl rice (100 gm)	110	562.5	1: 1.7
1 bowl lentil (140 gm)	160	1575	1: 10
potato curry(100g)	120	337.5	1: 2.8

So to earn one calorie from lentils, I burden the earth with 1575/160= 9.8 or approx. 10 calories in fuel oil, matching Manning’s estimate of 1:10.

We keep reading about oil addiction but such estimates actually open our eyes- if my food consumption would mean 6075 Kcal of oil just for lunch and dinner, we can imagine the oil energy consumption of 6 billion people every day, each year! The calorific value shall be even higher for parts of the world that eat processed food for almost every meal. In India still most food is local but food is tending to get more processed and its high time we steered away from that direction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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