Food, from source to mouth

As a concluding post, I thought it’d be fitting to talk a bit about fuel and it’s sources. Many of my previous posts talks about the use of oil and then it stops there. But where does it come from and how is it produced? These are questions worth pondering about.

Of course, it depends on where we are situated in the world, where our oil comes from. I thought though, that I’d dedicate this last post to talking about the petrostate of Canada. Before we start, let’s take a look at this video:

When I first saw this video, I really did get a gush of pride running through my veins. This is what we’re about, what Canadians are! But let’s juxtapose this to pictures like this:

Unfortunately, this is what Canada is also. A petrostate. And we’re one like no other. In fact, it’s wrong to call us oil-rich, cause we’re not. We’re tar-rich. If oil could be called “clean”, than we’ve moved beyond clean oil, we’ve moved onto the dirty bitumen that Stephen Harper likes to call oil. This is what Manning means when he notes that in the 1940s, every barrel of oil invested returned 100 barrels, nowadays, around 10 barrels. When bitumen is extracted (extraction meaning playing tetris with tons upon tons of earth where only half is bituminous sand), it needs to be heated and heavily chemically processed before it can be sold. Not only that, to pass this molass-like consistency product through pipelines, it is most often diluted with more oil to make it run. Throughout this process, earth is shifted numerous times over, forests are clear-cut to get to the earth and the wildlife in the surrounding area disappears.

Nikiforuk in his book “Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent” uses a couple of ways to describe this process:
– “burning a Picasso for heat”
– “the resource has no value, other than the value we create”
– bottom-of-the-barrel resource, a signal that business as usual in the oil patch has ended

and finally: “an upgraded version of the smelly adhesive used by Babylonians to cement the Tower of Babel”

And based on this blog, this is where our food comes from.

Source:

Andrew Nikiforuk, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent (2010), 6 – 37

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

Today, some real food. Not only do the contents of my lunch include veggies (specifically Kai Lan), rice, egg and chicken, but of course a loving gesture from mom.

Having talked a bit about animals already (in my yogurt post), I’m going to skip out on eggs and chickens and instead focus on the role of imported East Asian foods – rice and Kai Lan in this meal. Before I delve deeper into this topic, it’s worthy to take a look at a recent article in the Richmond Review – “Should Canadians be eating rice?” by Arzeena Hamir

Let’s also take a look at a part of the rice growing process – flooding.

She asks a very controversial question – should we – and as she points out in the article it’s not “can we”. We here in Canada will be able to afford to transport rice from Southeast Asia for a long time, but the environmental problems with rice is abundant. Not only transportation, but the water and pesticides involved in rice paddies is immense. Of course,the pesticides involved come from oil. This article, amongst the different circles of colleagues and friends, was met with vastly different responses. Some just called the idea outright crazy while others … well, I’ve heard no other response.

My perspective? I think the habit of eating rice is something that needs to be waited out. It will inevitably die down from 1st generation immigrants to 1.5s to 2nd to 3rd generation. And I can speak on behalf of my family – my parents come to Canada not knowing the language have a hard enough time dealing with the new rules and regulations, the new taxes, the system, the environment … It’s a bit much to ask them to relook at their diet. It is without doubt that when I build my family, I’m not going to eat as much rice and similarly my children.

Kai-lan too, an imported food from Southern China, quite often makes it into my family’s meals. I wasn’t able to find any information on growing kai-lan, so other than the fact it travelled a long way, that’s about all I know.

Before we end this post – a brief comment on the chicken and eggs. Chickens are a primary predator, meaning some energy is wasted from the chicken’s food up to the chicken. This means that eating chicken is 10x less efficient than eating a plant. My mom does buy, however, free range eggs and chicken. Now with the questionable USDA regulations of specifying “access” to the outdoors, it’s hard to speculate whether my chicken was running around or just looking at the scenery.

“Our busy lives sometimes forces us to eat the wrong things at the wrong times.” Yeup, I agree. Like cup noodles 11pm at night. But a late night plus an early wake up call means that I get ready in the morning, grab an Activia and a spoon, and I head out to the bus stop.

In this post, I’m going to look into yogurt production. I can’t say it’s something that’s always interested me, but we’ve covered transportation and packaging already, so yogurt’s an interesting choice. (And packaging is simple! – more oil to make the plastic!)

Now, the extent of my knowledge of yogurt is that it comes from milk. The milk goes through a fermentation process where bacteria is added? or somehow develops, and le voilà! And it turns out I’m not too far off.

Yogurt in its production process is heated to around 80°C to rid the milk of bacteria before bacteria is added at 45°C. This temperature is maintained for 4-7 hours for fermentation. Now, I was unable to find out where Danone (the company that owns the Activia brand) makes their yogurt, so I can’t venture a guess about the energy origins of the operations involved. To keep a lot of milk at 45°C for 7 hours must mean a lot of electricity though. And nowadays, yogurt isn’t even made where the milk is produced. It’s made in a central processing plant a refrigeration process and a truck-ride away (more gas!)

Let’s go a bit further back into the raw materials of yogurt. The milk and the cow.

From our course readings – Power Steer in the New York Times by Michael Pollan – we know that this cartoon is not far from the truth. Hormones, vaccines and antibiotics are simply being pumped into cows since their close living quarters and unnatural diet of grains makes them get sick.

Not only is it unnatural, this grain that’s used to feed cows is an environmental bad as well. The corn needed to make this grain is grown using massive quantities of petrochemicals as fertilizers. In fact, Pollan claims that 1.2 gallons of oil are used in every bushel of corn. Logically, with the ever increasing price of oil, this would make corn and hence cows and milk prohibitively expensive. The United States doesn’t operate under a logical system however. Corn makes it into most livestock’s food because of federal subsidies that makes each bushel of corn 50 cents less expensive than the cost of growing it. Now we can think 50 cents, not too much, but this actually is more than 20% (22 to be exact) of how much corn is sold for – $2.25.

The monoculture environments that corn is grown in creates secondary effects. With each harvest, soil is degraded farther and farther and with each year, more petrochemicals are needed to feed the ground so that the ground can feed our food. As Manning suggests in his article, “5.5 gallons of fossil energy are needed to restore a year’s worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land.” And where does this even go? Nitrogen fertilizers go off and reacts chemically with its surroundings, forming nitrous oxide and eventually acid rain. It becomes runoff into rivers leading to big algae blooms that in turn destroy the surrounding marine life.

All just to feed some cows for their milk.

Source:

Michael Pollan, “Power Steer,” New York Times 31 March 2002.

Nothing but a 3-minute cup noodle meal in front of the TV helps me wind down from school from a late night class.

Despite what I just mentioned – I assure you that it’s a rare occurrence that cup noodles = dinner 11pm at night. With this unhealthy convenience “meal”, I’d like to start by talking about packaging.

Now, this is a better picture of my meal, not after being eaten and in the garbage can. It may not be clear in the picture, but the outer layer of this cup noodle is a plastic wrap. Now, we know that the raw materials of plastic is predominantly natural gas or petroleum. That means oil was used to wrap my food in a sheet of plastic that got thrown away within 3 seconds of me getting to my food.

Other than that, the cup itself. Now, it feels as if the cup is made out of paper, but in order for it to withstand boiling water on the inside, it is my guess that it’s also coated with wax. Of course, paper comes from pulp and for wood to travel to mills, some sort of transportation is needed. We’re probably beyond the years when logs used to be floated down rivers, so transportation is done by railway systems powered by renewable energies if we’re lucky, but if not, coal. As it turns out too, wax could be another petroleum-based product, especially those used for coating. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraffin#Paraffin_wax_2)

And of course, all this with the noodles in it came from Hong Kong (as you can see if you squint in the picture).

By boat or plane, then by truck upon truck, then by Honda 1997 CRV, then by bus. At least I know my bus may be a hybrid.

Other than that, largely dependent on fuel to power it’s trek. There are other aspects though, other than the conventional thought of transportation, where fuel enters the production of food , like oranges. In fact somewhere around 10 calories of oil is put into every calorie of food produced nowadays (Manning), not including transportation.

Growing Oranges

Let’s take a look at the producer side of the story. A simple Wikipedia search yields these results:

Oranges can be grown outdoors in warmer climates, and indoors in cooler climates. Like most citrus plants, oranges will not do well unless kept between 15.5°C – 29°C (60°F – 85°F). … Oranges require a huge amount of water and the citrus industry in the Middle East is a contributing factor to the desiccation of the region. … Oranges are sensitive to frost, and a common treatment to prevent frost damage when sub-freezing temperatures are expected is to spray the trees with water … Another strategy to prevent freezing of orange crops and trees is burning fuel oil in smudge pots (also known as a choofa or orchard heater). These burn with a great deal of particulate emission. … Smudge pots were first developed after a disastrous freeze in Southern California in January 1913 wiped out a whole crop.

This means that my oranges were being grown probably indoors kept warm by smudge pots. Never mind the particulate emission, but the heating and the electricity that must have been used to keep my oranges warm. This led me to research a bit into the source of electricity in California.

Again, from Wikipedia. Mainly fuelled by natural gas – meaning energy from the sun. And coal stuck out too – another source of hydrocarbon related energy.

A bit more digging though revealed to me the use of pesticides in oranges. In order to avoid the citrus greening disease, a bacterium that damages the fruit and kills the trees in 5-8 years, pesticides have been used on orange trees. Pesticides , as we know, is based very heavily on petrochemicals.

Sources:

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

The main character of my first post? Oranges. Specifically, these pre-peeled halves sitting in my plastic container.

I had them pose for a picture as I write about them on the beautiful UBC campus. Let’s follow the path of my oranges in reverse chronological order, accounting for the oil involved in the process.

Before they got to the table, of course, these oranges were in my backpack. They travelled from my home in Richmond, by bus of course.

Before that? Of course the supermarket. Most likely Superstore going by my mom’s shopping habits. 5.5km says Google Maps.

And from there? I rely on Wikipedia. Which tells me:

Brazil, most likely.
** Update: After consultation with my parents, the supermarket sign under which my mom bought my oranges said California. So maybe a bit shorter of a distance… 

Making this orange having travelled a long distance until it reached my mouth.