Day: March 15, 2011

A nice home cooked meal would be really nice at some point in my life.  However, with the school crunch right now, dinner was from the campus Tim Horton’s (approximately 7:00 pm).  A bowl of chili, toasted whole wheat bun, coffee and chocolate glaze doughnut were on tonight’s menu.

Of course most of the food will have used a lot of energy being produced, refined, and transported, however, I didn’t realize how much transportation was involved.  I should have been on the alert when I noted the lack of coffee plants here in Canada.  According to Tim Horton’s website most of their coffee comes from “Helping small holder farmers in Guatemala, Colombia and Brazil …”  This could indeed be an issue when, according to the Coffee Association of Canada, 63% of Canadians drink coffee on a daily basis, and that those people drink an average of 2.6 cups per day.  All of those coffee beans must be shipped by either trucks, boats or airplanes.  That’s a lot of energy.  That’s a lot of oil.

Lunch Time!  Approximately 1:30 pm.  Here I am, excited to sit down to my delicious, healthy lunch I packed for today.  I even packed vegetables today.  I was feeling quite good about it all until I got to the end of my meal and realized how much packaging I had to throw out.  I guess much of that could have been avoided by the use of reusable containers.

So to start with, I decided to look up how much that was costing me.  The amount of energy used to package products obviously varies from one to another, but, according to Danielle Murray of Earth Policy Institute:

“Approximately twenty-three percent of the energy used in our food production system is allocated to processing and packaging food.”

Next I will look into how much energy is used to produce and transport the food I’m eating, and how this translates into oil consumption.



I began my 24 hour food consumption record at 7:00 am, today, March 15, 2011.  I am unsure if I will be able to look at food the same after today, but it is time we were aware of the effects of our everyday actions.  Anyone can preach environmental protection, but until we begin investigating the unseen effects of all of our actions, can we really feel justified?

Every morning I wake up and eat the same thing: one piece of toast with peanut butter, and a banana.  Today was no different, except that usually I just take it for granted that this should be available and waiting for me when I wake up.  Today I will be investigating how it gets from the ground to my mouth, and in particular, the contribution of oil to this process.