Food Blog

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I tend to eat relatively healthy, and try to eat minimal amounts of processed food. With that being said, my food consumption on July 7^th, 2011, was quite typical, and consisted of 40% protein, 40% carbohydrates, and 20% fats. My caloric intake for the day was around 2400 calories which was split between the respective sources mentioned above. In the article, “The Oil We Eat: Following the Food Chain Back to Iraq”, by Richard Manning, it is mentioned that it takes roughly ten calories of oil to produce one calorie of food. Keeping this in mind, my daily consumption is about 2400 calories, so 24000 calories of oil would be needed in order to produce it! Not to mention the containers they are packed in, and transportation costs to get them to the grocery stores. My food consumption on July 7^th, 2011, was as follows:

From a health standpoint, when carbohydrates are processed and refined, they are geared away from whole grains. The whole grains take longer for our body to digest and remain in our systems for a sustained amount of time. Processed carbohydrates however such as sugar, cause an immediate reaction in which the body releases insulin due to high blood sugar levels in the body. This causes the body to immediately store the carbohydrates in the body’s fat stores. From this, we can see that eating foods that are natural and unprocessed, are much better for you in the long run. The United States obesity epidemic can be attributed to people eating these processed foods, and as the article states another form of storage of energy. In this regard, oil provides useful energy to produce food, but it becomes useless when it takes the form of body fat.

When considering the transportation costs, these are astounding as well. It is 2500 miles from Vancouver to Ontario, and my SUV gets roughly 18 miles per gallon in fuel consumption. To drive from Vancouver to Ontario in my SUV, it would burn 140 gallons of fuel! From this you can see just how many gallons of fuel would be burned by a heavy duty shipping truck like the one above (much higher!). Also, the fruit I consumed came from Ecuador and New Zealand, whose routes are indicated on the map below by red and blue respectively. When considering food that comes from places such as these, you must take into account the extra shipping costs involved in shipping the food across large bodies of water (perhaps on larger tankers).

Forty percent of my total caloric intake is protein, meaning that 960 calories come from protein. The article mentions that proteins are converted to fat, but this is not an accurate statement. Proteins that are not absorbed by the body are passed through the body as waste after detaching themselves from their amino group. The oil spent to make this excess protein is essentially wasted as it does not get absorbed by the body and simply passes through the body and gets converted into a form that needs to be recycled back into the atmosphere. This of course cannot be done without more work, and yes more calories. There are also 960 calories of my daily intake coming from carbohydrates which are transformed into sugar by the body. Some of it is used as energy throughout the day, but the rest of it is stored as fat, and not in a useful form of energy as Rick Manning states in his article. This again is using the energy of oil, and converting it into a useless form that nobody benefits from. Twenty percent of the total calories come from fats, and that means that about 480 calories come from this source. There are good fats that are used by the body for different bodily functions such as lubricating joints, but the bad fats are stored directly as fat by the body. About half of my fat intake comes from bad fats so that means that 240 calories are stored into my body and rendered useless. As you can see, many of the calories I took in, are converted into a form of energy that is useless. This energy could definitely be used for something more useful in the world. This means that 2400 calories of oil are not converted into a useless form.

The article also talks about vegetarians and that they advocate eating at the lowest level in the food chain. I somewhat agree with their standpoint, which can be applied to chicken I consumed. For example, the chicken needs to be taken care of, and fed up until the point when it is butchered. The food does not go directly into myself the consumer, but has an intermediate that absorbs much of the energy of the primary food source. The article states that you lose ten times the energy when an intermediate is involved, so thinking rationally, that means that these types of foods are ten times more costly than the other foods we consume. I eat about 400 calories of protein from these sources everyday, this means that it takes 4000 calories to make this meat, but since there is an intermediate, it takes 40000 calories to produce this 400 calories of protein! I cannot come up with exact numbers when it comes to exactly how much oil was used in the production of the foods I consumed, but I think that the spinach would consume the least. The spinach was low on the food chain and its nutrients can be absorbed directly by the consumer. The other natural foods which were the apple and banana, most likely use the same amount of oil for their development, but I feel that the distances they need to travel to get here add to their costs. Also, bananas and apples are treated with ethylene to induce ripening, so timing can be crucial when storing them. To help alleviate this, some produce can be stored in controlled-atmosphere chambers so that they can be stored for months at a time. The controlled-atmosphere chambers slow down the actions of ethylene and thus the ripening of the product. One can see just how costly the transportation and storage of the bananas and apples can become. This is why I chose spinach to use the least amount of oil in its production, because although both use different pesticides and oil dependent fertilizers for their growth, the spinach is relatively close in distance as it originates out of California.  With that being said, I attributed the chicken I ate to being the most heavily reliant on oil. This is due to the oil needed in order to sustain these intermediate food sources. On a typical day, I might interchange the chicken for beef, and there is a vast amount of energy used in maintaining animals such as these. For example, crops need to be grown and maintained just to feed these animals, let alone maintaining themselves.

Something that is not mentioned in the article is the factor of warehouses and food storage. Grocery stores can only hold their products for so long, so there needs to be a medium to store the food until it is needed. These warehouses need energy to run, machines to maneuver  and store the different products, and lots of manpower to run the machines of the warehouse. We never think about how much work goes into making such a simple thing that our bread and other groceries come in.  I do not even notice the bag until it is time to curl it up into a ball, and throw it into the trash can. What we do not realize is there is a vast amount of energy that goes into making these packages. The machines take oil of course and the workers use their own calories which are present in the food they consume. To make us appreciate just how much energy and effort is needed, I have included the following video clip to show just how many machines, as well as man power it takes to make a simple plastic bag.

The topics of the Green Revolution, Gene Revolution, and commodifying the seed also come into mind in this discussion. I speculate as to why the foods I consumed originate from the places they do. The Green Revolution enabled wheat to be produced in high yields all over the world. Wheat is present in the processed foods I consumed which were the bread and oatmeal, and this is reflected as a result of the Green Revolution by its availability. Oatmeal, for example, is produced right here in Canada, and it is extremely cheap to buy. The Gene Revolution, in my opinion, can be seen in all of the natural foods I consumed. Seeds are developed with certain genes to maximize their ability to survive and successfully develop into foods such as the spinach I ate. I see that the bananas I consumed came all the way from Ecuador, and I question why. It could be due to the climate in Ecuador, but I question if developed countries are mutating seeds, patenting them, and then selling them to places such as Ecuador to grow. This way the developed countries can reap the benefits as they can buy cheap labour and take advantage of the ideal climate for development. At the end of day, however, all of it takes energy to produce, and energy is produced by oil. With that being said, the people with the oil make the decisions and gain the profits.

This assignment has given me insight and a much deeper appreciation for how much energy actually goes into producing the food I consume on a daily basis. I feel that I need to incorporate foods low on the food chain such as vegetables so that energy is used in its highest potential. Also I need to recognize where the foods are coming from and the shipping costs associated with those distances. Lastly, I need to pay attention to the packaging of the food, and realize just how much energy is used to create a fancy, and in my opinion completely wasteful package. I realize that I have the power to be more environmentally friendly, and friendlier to those in underdeveloped nations by consuming certain foods. Rick Manning states that a two-pound bag of cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its production. For simplicity sake, I will take an educated guess and say that roughly the same amount of gasoline is used to produce the loaf of bread I eat each week. This is mind blowing when considering if I was to eat around 27 loaves of bread, the amount of gasoline used in the production, would take me to my hometown of Prince George from Vancouver in my SUV.