1 cup of Kin’s Market Local Organic Blueberries
1 1/2 cup of homemade Potato Salad
Ingredients: Mayonnaise, Potatoes (From our garden), Green Onion (From our Garden), Egg, Chili peppers.
1 Slice of Ham – Eating Right, Lucerene, Calgary, Alberta
BC Grown Organic Blueberries
Whenever summer time comes along, I’m always excited for all the fresh fruits that I get to have! One of my favourite fruits in the world is blueberries. Lucky for me BC is one of the biggest and most successful blueberry growing regions in the world. We have excellent blueberry soil and climate. What most people don’t know is that blueberries are a relatively newer type of commercialized fruit. Up until the 20th century, you could really only come across them in the wild as they were very difficult to grow. As agricultural science became more advanced, the secrets of good blueberry farming were unlocked
Blueberries need extremely acidic soil to grow. Because of this, farmers may need to mix the soil with other chemicals in order to heighten the acid content of the soil. Without acidic soil the blueberries will not grow. Luckily enough, BC has quite acidic soil which is perfect for blueberry growing and lessens the amount of additives needed for the soil, which in turn lessens the amount of oil necessary.
A lot of the time blueberry farms are U-Pick or farmer picked but they may also use machines, especially when the blueberries start running low. These machines are oil guzzlers. Which add to the amount of oil involved in making blueberries.
Check out a Blue Berry Picking Machine Here!
Finally the packaging, I’m glad that it is fully recyclable but that still doesn’t mean that oil wasn’t involved in making it. All the blueberry packages are created in a factory to get their perfect carton shapes. Which means that machines and oil are used to make them.
The fact that my blueberries were organic means that no additives or chemicals were used in making them, which lowers their oil usage substantially. In addition, the fact that they are local means that very little gas was used to transport these berries. Overall, although they do use some oil. They are much more oil friendly than a lot of other crops and foods.
This is great news for me because, I LOVE THEM.
Eggs
Eggs are great. What’s not to love about eggs? The eggs used in my Grandma’s Potato salad were Safeways Specialty III large eggs that boast extra omega 3.
These eggs are packaged in Calgary, Alberta by Lucerne which is Safeway’s food company. Because they are coming from Alberta rather than from the States or from other parts of the country, they will use up less gas to be transported to Vancouver. This is still not nearly as oil friendly as buying local.
They are Canadian eggs which means that they are supplied by Canadian egg farmers, but they are not certified humane like some of Safeway’s other eggs (Organics, and Cage Free) which means that these hens are probably kept in cages and I cannot guarantee that they have been treated well.
The packaging states that,
Eggs are produced from Hen fed a special grain, and plant based vegetarian diet using only naturally low in saturated fat canola oil in place of animal fats and by products.
What this means is left to the imagination of the reader, these hens may be fed a mix of corn and grains or any other combination of plants and grains. What is different about these hens though is that in order to get a high content of Omega 3 in their eggs they are fed diets high in omega 3 fatty acids.
In order to increase the amount of omega 3 they feed the hens things like flax and marine algae, which are high in the nutrient. (Specialty Eggs). This means that there is a good chance my hens were fed this as well.
Although the packaging is fully recyclable (according to the Safeway website), it is machine made, which uses up oil. Machines a necessary to form the paper into it’s special shock absorbing carton state.
In addition, eggs and vegetable oil (see below) are the two main ingredients in mayonnaise, which was another ingredient in the potato salad.
This make mayo a pretty oil intense food when you buy it in a package. Mayo that is produced commercially, has been made by machines. It also comes in a plastic or glass container/bottle which means that machines were also used to make the packaging. The most common mayo that we use in my household is Hellmanns. I believe that it is one of the biggest if not the biggest mayo makers in the world.
Hellmanns has begun to switch over all it’s eggs to being free range, and promises to use only free range eggs by 2020. They have also started the Real Food Movement Foundation, which gives grants to people working towards real food. This means food where you know where it comes from, and how it grows. I believe this is an excellent idea and a step in the right direction. (Hellman’s Real Food)
Ham
I love meat and I admit to eating a lot of it. Often I eat more than necessary simply because I enjoy it so much. I should probably try and cut down on the amount of meat I consume and eat a bit greener. The following excerpt from Manning’s article highlights an excellent point,
Green eaters, especially vegetarians, advocate eating low on the food chain, a simple matter of energy flow. Eating a carrot gives the diner all that carrot’s energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken, then eating the chicken, reduces the energy by a factor of ten. The chicken wastes some energy, stores some as feathers, bones, and other [in-]edibles, and uses most of it just to live long enough to be eaten.
Taking that into account, I honestly believe that adopting a more green and less meat orientated diet would be really helpful for me in the long run and I think it will also lower the amount of oil I consume. The ham I ate was from Eating Right, this is one of Safeway’s brands and like most Safeway brand many meat products is hard to find out anything about.
The fact that Safeway has little to no information about their meat processing makes me wonder how the animals are treated and where they get their meat from. I also attempted to contact them by e-mail asking about their ham and pig process but did not receive a reply.
The ham is processed and packaged in Calgary, Alberta. Which means that although there is still a hefty amount of fuel used to transport it to the supermarket, it is less than if the factory was located in another part of the country.
According to Canada Pork International, Almost all commercialized Canadian pigs are grown in a controlled environment. This means they are in enclosed indoor areas. They usually spend their entire short lives in one sow pen, so that they are easily tracked, do not suffer stress from environmental change, and cannot spread disease as easily. While this is convenient for the farmers, I doubt that this is ideal for the pigs.
When the pigs are nice and juicy, they are transported to a slaughterhouse (transportation always uses lots of oil), where they are slaughtered and packaged for their different types of meat. It takes large amounts of energy to power these machines and they work quickly (kill in just seconds) which means it takes a hefty amount of oil to power them. Ham comes from the back hind leg of a pig.
The most disturbing part of this for me is that my ham was tiny, which means it must have come from a small pig. This means that the pigs can’t be very old when they are slaughtered.