The oil I (literally…) consume on a daily basis.
Hello there! As promised, I am about to put on my investigator hat and explore where the food I eat on a regular day comes from. If you think you can handle it, and won’t judge me for my weird eating habits, then read on…
I thought I would mention fertilizers at the beginning, because they apply to almost everything that I have eaten this day. According to Manning, the fertilizer that is applied to 1 acre of depleted land for 1 year takes 5.5 gallons of oil! Putting that into context, 1 acre of land can yield about of 10, 000 lbs of vegetables in a year (find out more here!). So that means each pound of vegetables takes up .00055 gallons (.0021 litres) of oil in fertilizer. Noting that each person consumes about 255 pounds of veggies per year, (source), the oil contribution from vegetables from fertilizer from the average person would be about .14 gallons (.53 litres). Interesting. So keep that in the back of your mind when you look at what I’m eating, every crop has a bit of extra oil associated with it due to fertilization.
Also interesting to note is the petroleum used by semi trucks (which I would assume to be the main mode of transportation for my food). They typically get 5 – 8.5 mpg, and carries 50 – 100 thousand pounds. Some simple calculations leads me to conclude that about 5 x 10 – 6 litres per kilometer are burned per pound of food.
Most of the food I bought this week was from my local grocery store (Stong’s), approximately 1 km away from my house. Here’s a picture of the inside, from their website.
Any packaging that is associated with my food will either be reused (this is most cases, because I live in a thrifty and environmentally conscious household), recycled, or thrown into the garbage. Food scraps are composted. The garbage, recycling, and compost will have extra oil consumption associated with them because they are collected by the city and taken to the various depots where the city handles this waste. The Vancouver landfill is 16km away and both garbage and compost is brought here, moreover the recycling depot is only 15 km away. Thus the transport of these products should not contribute a huge amount of petroleum consumption, especially because my household attempts to minimize our garbage by re-using whatever we can.
Throughout my investigation I will refer to Richard Manning, and (if you’re curious) the article that I’m generally referring to can be found here.
I am going to say that the oil associated with me physically going to pick up groceries is extremely low… as I do it by bicycle. (This is my bike, ribbons and all)
Here is a picture of me and my bicycle, aren’t we a cute couple?
So what was on the menu for breakfast? The same thing I eat every day for breakfast, toast (with peanut butter) and tea with honey!
So lets start with the bread! The easy part here is that the bread was baked at Hill’s bakery on E. Hastings here in Vancouver, just 18 km away from my house. So that bread had to be transported to the grocery store that I bought it from which is 19 km away from the bakery. The bread came in a plastic bread bag, and plastic is made out of processed petroleum. My roommate and I both bake bread periodically so the bag will be reused to house bread or will at least be used to store vegetables. The bread contains: flour, sugar, vegetable oil shortening, water, and yeast. I don’t know where this bakery sources their flour, so I am just going to assume it came from the wheat dominated province of Saskatchewan, 1700 km away. Now, following harvesting of the wheat, which is already done by oil guzzling machines, it needs to be ground and processed into flour, which requires even more oil. Most likely, the wheat was harvested and ground in the same province, I don’t know how far the wheat had to be transported to the mill, but that is certainly another source of petroleum use . I am just going to guess that the sugar in the bread is similar to the sugar in my cupboard, which came from Sugarland, Texas: 4, 000 km away. Yep, sugar comes from Sugarland, go figure. So similarly to the flour, the sugar needs to be processed, first machines squeeze the juice out of the sugar cane, then the water is evaporated out of the juice, and the resulting syrup is boiled until crystals form (you can read more about it here). Each of these processes would require a fair amount of oil fueled energy. I am going to assume that the vegetable shortening in the bread is something similar to the Crisco that I talk about later, and it definitely has a large amount of petroleum in its production and shipment (So scroll down to the “pie” section if you are interested!). Yeast is found on the skin of most fruits, and thus can be obtained almost anywhere. It is grown and fed with sugar and then dried and transported to where it is needed. There will be some oil consumption in the transport and production of this yeast, but I am unsure as to exactly what it is.
The peanut butter contained 100% peanuts! According to this post peanuts are quite typically grown in the Southern United states, probably about 4500 km away. The peanuts are the brand of my local grocery store (it isn’t a franchise), so I think that the peanuts were probably roasted and ground somewhere close by. Both gridning and roasting the peanuts to make peanut butter would require some amount of petroleum. The peanut butter also came in a plastic jar, which would be made of petroleum. I often make my own peanut butter or nut butters so this will be saved to store those which I will either use myself or give away.
Looking at my tea’s website, I found that it comes from a pretty cool company.
Here is an adorable picture I found of their tea fields.
They claim that they ensure the tea is “cultivated, processed and packaged in an exceptional manner”. I’m not exactly sure what that means, but being organic, that means there at least isn’t any petroleum in the fertilizer. The tea leaves need to be harvested and dried, and the machinery and energy that goes into that probably requires some petroleum. The tea also scores points for being packaged in cardboard and paper, no plastic! These paper products, would, however, have to be processed to some extent which would require some petroleum energy. They will also be processed at the recycling plant later which will require more energy (but will save energy from producing new paper products). According to that website the tea may have been grown in a variety of places, so I am just going to arbitrarily assume it came from India : 13000 km away. So, the tea seems relatively sustainable, aside from the vast distances it needs to travel to get to me.
The honey was from Madeira park, about 107 km away from my house! It was made by my friend’s dad who brought it when he came to Vancouver by truck. The oil consumption here is pretty low because not only did he not come from very far away but probably would have been making this trip anyways.
Here’s a picture of the ingredients (and appliances) that made up this meal
It had been a pretty busy day, so I didn’t really eat lunch. At two o’clock I ate an apple from a bag of apples that I bought at apple fest a couple weekends ago. It originally came from the Okanagan about 400km away, and unfortunately they only came in plastic bags (more petroleum!). Hopefully I will be able to reuse or recycle the bag. (I went to the apple festival by bike, as usual)
I also ate a few sugar peas that I had brought with me. When I purchased the bag of peas I didn’t think much beyond: Sugar peas are my favorite peas! Looking at it for this assignment, it turns out they came from China. My immediate reaction was: Holy beans! They must grow peas somewhere closer than china. A quick google search informed me that they can be grown in many parts of the world, including my own garden. Well then. So if the peas were from China, they came over 8000 kilometers likely by large cargo boat and a diesel semi truck. Both of these would use large quantities of oil. The peas also came in a plastic bag that wasn’t recyclable or reusable. Yikes, More petroleum! I won’t be buying those peas again.
And then my friend brought me a piece of pie (what a nice guy!). We made it yesterday out of Crisco shortening, flour, sugar, pumpkin, tofu (yes you read that right) and various pie spices. I didn’t pick up most of the ingredients to this pie, so I’m just going to speculate based on what I have on hand. I won’t talk about the flour and sugar, because they are mentioned in an earlier paragraph (in the bread section) and I’m just going to assume the flour and sugar are from similar sources.
I didn’t take a picture of the pie…but it looked something like this: (image from here)
Crisco, interestingly, contains soybean oil, palm oil, mono and diglycerides, TBHQ and citric acid. The closest the soybeans for the soybean oil would have come from is Alberta, which is a 900 km semi truck ride away. The palm oil was most likely from West Africa, some 10, 000 km away by semi truck and cargo ship. Somewhere between their source and our pie, however, the oil had to be extracted from the soy beans and the palm kernels. The details of the process for soybeans can be found here, and it includes solvents, filtration, and bleaching. The process for making palm oil can be found here, and involves industrially pressing and grinding the kernels to obtain the oil. These processes seem pretty involved so I would assume there is a fair bit of oil and energy that goes into producing the chemicals and powering the machines that do the processing. Moreover, Manning states that processed foods typically take about 10 calories of oil energy for every calorie of food produced! Mono and diglycerides are derived from vegetable oil sources, but are likely associated with even more petroleum than these oil sources because they are more processed. TBHQ is actually directly derived from petroleum. Whoa, I actually ate oil. However, it shouldn’t exceed more than .02 % of the fat content of any food (source). Thus, though it is petroleum derived, the quantity of it in the pie was very small. Citric acid comes from citric fruits such as oranges, lemons, and grapefruit, and could have come from a huge variety of places: I’m just going to say I don’t know on that one.
I am going to guess that the pumpkin was grown somewhere in BC (maybe 10 -600km away), because pumpkins are so easy to grow here and there are quite a few pumpkin fields around, so the oil involved in transporting the pumpkin should be pretty low. Pumpkin is tough and needs to bake for a long time before it can be put into pie, so a fair amount of electricity went into heating the stove to bake the pumpkin (half of the baked pumpkin, however, went to soup I made another day). I will again assume the soy beans from the tofu came from Alberta 900 km away, and then they had to be processed into tofu, which involves grinding and straining the beans (the details of this process can be found here). This process seems less energy intensive than turning the beans into oil, but probably does require a significant amount of oil. The tofu does, however, come in plastic packaging which is made of more petroleum. Hopefully this packaging will be recycled. The final ingredients were spices, noteably cinnamin, nutmeg, ginger. Many of these spices come from Asian countries, probably about 10, 000 km away. The amount of spices used, however, is small compared to the size of the food, so I would assume that spices would not contribute a significant amount of petroleum use to the final product.
Mmm… pie spices (image from here)
Dinner was stir fried tofu with onions, red peppers, and carrots, served with a side of roasted potatoes with rosemary. All of these were cooked in canola oil. According to the label at Stong’s, the veggies were all grown somewhere in BC. Likely all of these came from 10-600 km away from the store. I don’t use plastic bags for any of the produce I buy if I can help it, and none of these veggies came in plastic bags. I already discussed tofu in the pie section, and I’ll assume all tofu is approximately equivalent oil-wise. The canola in the canola oil here is most likely obtained from Alberta, again 900 km away. I it is processed similarly to the palm oil, and the details can be found here. Again, the amount of processing and transport here leads to a pretty high petroleum footprint.There is even more petroleum in this bottle of oil because it is packaged in a plastic bottle. We will recycle that bottle when it is empty. All that being said, I don’t use an awful lot of oil in my cooking so it should contribute minimally to my petrol consumption. The rosemary was liberated by my roommate, who found some growing ornamentally somewhere near our house (I’m not sure how legal that is so maybe pretend I didn’t say that). I would think the oil consumption in that rosemary should be slim to none.
My dinner did earn a photo op. I think the red peppers add a nice splash of colour.
I feel like the transport portion of my food is probably the largest contribution of oil because I seem to have a lot of random ingredients in my food that have come from quite far away. This is another opportunity to emphasize how important buying local food is! I often only think about buying local in terms of produce, but this assessment made me realize that a lot of random things like spices and tea can consume a lot of petroleum because of how far away they are produced.
If you are interested finding out how to eat more locally check out : the sustainable table’s website. Also, the Winter Vancouver Farmers Market starts this Saturday at Nat Bailey Stadium. If you haven’t been to any of the farmers markets yet, you are missing out! Not only is it an awesome atmosphere filled with delicious, nutritious, and local food, but its a great way to meet some of the people who are actually involved in growing the food you eat.
Okay thats all, that was a full day of food in Chelsea’s life! Kudos if you stuck around long enough to read the entire thing. Writing this was a pretty exciting and eye-opening experience, and I would highly encourage anyone who is interested to give it a try!
Cheers,
Chelsea Enslow.