The Oil I Eat: Fraser's History 106 Blog

Overall, I found this blog very fascinating! I would like to share a few of the revelations that I came to while writing the blog:

1. The extent to which the location of the food matters (in term of fossil fuels). Often I pay close attention to whether or not something is Oceanwise or organic, as well trying to bike or drive a short distance to my local supermarket to get food. However in terms of food being local, I would say that before the blog, as long as it wasn’t outside of North America I thought I was doing a pretty good job with minimizing fuel consumption related to transportation. Mapping the areas out reminded me that North America is a pretty big place that is very interconnected agriculturally, so in the future I will definitely try to be more informed on where my food is coming from.

2. Information about the oil used in the processing aspects of food is very difficult to find. I would attribute this largely to how interconnected and complex each aspect of the food production process is right now. For example, it was exceedingly difficult to figure out which industrial refrigeration company the egg farm used, let alone the amount of energy that particular fridge uses in a certain time period and how much of that energy can be attributed to fossil fuel. Given the comparitively simple measurements for fuel efficiency in cars, oil used in transportation was much easier to estimate.

3. Fish, if caught wild, locally, and with little processing,  are probably a better option in terms of fuel consumption in comparison to other meats.

Thanks for reading my blog, and I hope you found it interesting!

For my dinner on Wednesday, I had Salmon burgers with organic Coleslaw from BC. Although many ingredients went into the burger, I would like to focus on two in particular that I feel haven’t been covered in my previous blog posts (for example, I have already gone into where the brand of bread I buy comes from, and the other ingredients have come from places I’ve already mentioned). Those two items of interest for me are the salmon burger itself and the avocado that I put on the burger.

The avocado I felt was important to mention because it is definitely the most regular food I buy that is not from Canada or the United States. The Avocado I bought is from Mexico, and has been exceedingly difficult to find out about its growing methods of production process online. I wonder if this is because there hasn’t been as much domestic pressure on Mexican produce companies by consumers to give a detail account of the seed to plate journey of their product. Often the videos I encountered of North American farms had a defensive feel to them, as if they were being made to try and satisfy a critical sentiment of the current agricultural process.

The second ingredient that I wanted to look into was the salmon burger, which I bought as a special item from the fish counter at Finest At Sea. The store boasts that all of its products are wild and ocean wise. Given that the fish were gutted, processed, and made in the shop, essentially no packaging was required for the burgers. This means that essentially the only fuel used for fish production, if it is wild, local and not factory processed, is from transportation. The salmon were caught along the coast of Vancouver island, most likely near the Broughten Archipelago.

Due to the varying conditions of the sea and greater variation in commercial boats and motors, it is very difficult to accurately measure the oil consumption of a fishing boat[1].

However, given that the fish is wild and doesn’t need any human inputs to grow, as well as its close proximity to my location and the minimal processing it had to go through, I would conclude that salmon uses less oil than the turkey that I looked into for my lunch post.

Here is my final updated maps of the world. I was lucky enough to keep all of my food products in North America for 24 hours!

Contrary to my predictions in my last post, my lunch on Wednesday was actually more local in its ingredients. I unfroze some chili I had made a week ago, and ate that with some couscous. Ill do my best to outline all of the ingredients in the chili:

Prepackaged mix

The pre-packaged mix includes raw beans, chili spices and some dried chives for extra flavor. It is packaged by a company called Mitchell’s Soup Company, which to my delight hand makes all of their products from the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island! I have finallycome across a food product thatdoes not have to cross water to get to the supermarket. It is roughly 140 km from the valley, to Thrifty Foods, to my house, so in a truck that would burn roughly 54.6 litres of gas to transport.

The pre-packaged recipe calls for 3 extra ingredients: tomatoes, an onion and some ground beef. The tomatoes are from Abbostsford BC, which I was thrilled to hear because it’s the first ingredient I’ve blogged about to be within 100 miles of my home! However, it just barely makes it at around 94 miles. It  was also grown in a greenhouse, which although makes use of solar energy to heat itself through convection, still has to be heated significantly using fossil fuels in colder climates.

The onions are grown in the USA. Washington is the second largest state in the US for onion production, as well as being the closest state to BC, so initially I guessed that this is where the onion is from. However, according to the National Onion Association (of the United States), spring and summer onions are more likely to come from Arizona, which is roughly 2,800 km away[1]. To my surprise, despite not having the handling restrictions of dairy products, onions go through a similar inspection process to that of eggs. Both are inspected, graded, packaged, and usually required to be kept cool or frozen for storage in cooler months.

As for the meat, I tried to avoid ground beef and choose a non-ruminating animal as a substitute, namely ground turkey. The turkey was grown organically also in the Cowichan Valley, which means that there are considerably lower fossil fuel inputs into their feed. The turkey must still be processed and its meat ground and packaged to ultimately be transported to stores, which may possibly use oil as a fuel and plastics input to carry these steps out.

The couscous was prepared in Delta, BC and is also organic, which greatly surprised me as well because I have eaten this brand of couscous before many times and never knew it was organic. It was only after scouring the box for the area in which it was grown that I found in tiny writing on the bottom of the box “Certified Organic by the Organic Crop Improvement Association”. I was perplexed as to why the company would not want to advertise this more transparently to their consumers, especially if they had gone through the trouble to get it certified by an official organization.  The Box is 100% recycled paper, which saves some oil in not having to construct new paper but is still a very oil and water intensive project due to the recycling.

My last ingredient that I thought I should touch on is the water I was drinking.  Victoria sits almost directly on the Juan de Fuca fault line, which means that we are very susceptible to earthquakes. The area is in fact “due” for the next big one, which could come tomorrow or in 100 years from now. The situation gets worse when the fact that 95% of Vancouver islands food is imported from the mainland[2] is considered, which brings up serious food security issues if we were ever cut off from the mainland for a short period of time for any reason. As a result, our family stays stocked with a lot of canned goods that we eat and restock but keep in large supply, as well as having an emergency water cooler. These water jugs are kept in a tick plastic container and can become unsafe to drink if they are stored for too long.

As a result, despite having clean and fresh tap water, we usually drink from the cooler which uses much more oil to package and transport. I thought this is an interesting example of how our entire family, including myself, is not willing to put an environmental concern above what we feel is our personal safety insurance. However the water is tapped from Fanny Bay, BC and is bottled in Richmond, BC, so at least the entire production process is spread over less than a 300km distance.

*just to clarify the water I used to cook the chili in was from the tap. I still end up using the tap a lot!

Here is the update on my north american map of food origin. Florida still holds the infamous position for longest transportation:

Breakfast for me is the most important meal of the day, which in a way makes it the most important meal for measuring oil because I religiously eat the exact same breakfast every day. My breakfast virtually always consists of 2 eggs, fried or scrambled, with 2 pieces of toast with margarine. Very occasionally my parents will have bought breakfast sausages or bacon and I will have a few, but most of the time (as well as Wednesday, which was when I recorded my food consumption) it’s just eggs and toast.

Eggs

The brand of eggs that my parents buy is called Nature Egg Omega 3. I called their company office in Calgary to find out more information on how the eggs arrive to Victoria, where I live. The receptionist told me that most of the eggs that are shipped to the island come from their closest farm in Alberta. However, she also said that the special omega 3 brand that my parents buy, which feeds the chicken a special flaxseed diet for better nutrition in eggs, probably has come from their production facilities in Winnipeg.

As I dug deeper on their website, I found exactly what I was looking for- a “from the farm to your table” page, outline every step of the process from what I am assuming is from their farm in Springstein, Manitoba to Victoria, BC. Their comprehensive flowchart can be found here[1], but I will briefly touch on the steps myself and try to come up with a rough quantitative value for the oil used where I can.

The areas where fossil fuels were used are as follows:

1. On the Farm: The chickens making omega 3 eggs are fed on a diet that consists largely of flaxseed and other grains. These grains are not only very likely to have been grown with fossil fuels[2], but also had to be transported from the flaxseed farm, probably by truck, to the chicken farm in Springstein.

2. The eggs are stored in a refrigerated storage room before being transported. Like BC, most of manitoba’s power is hydroelectric, so this would have a relatively low oil consumption

3. The eggs are transported from the farm to the grading station. From what I could understand from talking on the phone to Burnbrae farms, the grading plant that processes the Manitoba eggs is likely in Winnipeg, which is roughly an hour drive away in a refrigerated truck from the farm at Springstein.

4. The eggs go through a grading process, which involves cleaning, inspecting, weighing, stamping and packaging the eggs into cartons. His process is now entirely mechanized, so it seems to be a high energy process. It also is important to note that while much of this energy may be hydroelectric, the energy that was used to produce the egg cartons could have a much higher carbon footprint if it was made outside Manitoba.

5. after being packaged and stored in another cooling room, they are taken by refrigerated truck to the supermarket. The distance from Winnipeg to Vancouver is roughly 2294 km. As I was fortunate enough to read on Jon’s food blog[3], he cited that Natural Resources Canada put the average fuel consumption for trucks in 2000 was 39.5/100km[4], although I would suspect that that number may be lower today due to increases in fuel efficiency. By the averages of the year 2000, the amount of fuel used to drive from Winnipeg to Vancouver would be roughly 90,613 litres. That number would have to be divided by the number of eggs were actually in the truck to get the average amount of oil that we could assign to 2 eggs.

6. the eggs then stay in the refrigerator of the supermarket until my parents use fuel to drive to the Thrifty Foods that is 10 minutes away from our house, purchase the eggs, and then drive back. This entire process takes around 6-10 days.

Interestingly, I stumbled across Burnbrae Farms Social Responsibility where they assert that their focus is on preserving the environment. They currently have an employee energy awareness program in place that aims to reduce the energy consumption of their farms by 3% over the next year, although they do not say when this was implemented and when the deadline will be. They also have waste management and wildlife preservation programs, which includes them designating 1100 acres of wood for wildlife habitat and planted 2,500 trees in “three years”(again it does not specify when those years were).

Toast

The toast I ate was called stone milled 100% whole wheat from country harvest. Given that it is a Canadian company and that its main ingredient is flour, I would assume that it comes from somewhere inside Canada, probably somewhere on the prairies, which means it is at least 1000 km away from Victoria. The packaging is plastic, which takes fossil fuels to create. Given that the packaging for bread is similar to a plastic grocery bag, I will assume its weight and fuel intake for production is the same. The average plastic bag is 5.5 grams[5], and it takes 1.26 kg of oil and natural gas and 48 Mejajoules of energy (which is roughly equivalent to one litre of oil) to produce one kg of plastic bags[6]. This is difficult to quantify for only one bag in a 24 hour period, but using these numbers a rough estimate for plastic production of bread could be calculated for a year.

Its also important to note that energy was used to power my toaster to toast the bread; however, given that I live in BC, most of my electricity is hydroelectric.

Orange Juice

The juice I drank yesterday is from Tropicana. Tropicana buys and processes all of their oranges from Florida, and then ships it around the world. When looking at the video above from the Tropicana website, I was interested to learn a few things that hadn’t occurred to me before. The first thing was that all of their orange juice is pasteurized for health reasons when shipping. This is another step in the long and complex processing of the juice, coordinated by computer and human supervision.

The other thing that interested me was that given that Tropicana OJ is demanded year round, the company makes extra juice and stores it under refrigeration. The harvesting season for juice oranges generally ranges from December to march[7]. The interesting aspect of this is that depending on what time of year it is, the juice may have a different fossil fuel receipt to it. I was aware of this idea already, but the interesting part is when I realized that in this case, that wasn’t because the fruit was being shipped from a warmer place, but more that due to the growing season, fruit coming from the same place takes up fuel to be refrigerated in the off season.

After the processing, the Tropicana that I drank was transported to where I live, with a combination of truck, rail and ferry travel. Tropicana insinuates that much of its transportation is done by rail, which it purports is three times more energy efficient than moving it by truck. I know that it travels by truck at least part of the way, given that I live on an island, and that it had to cross over on the ferry at some point. I would think that given its distance, as well as the processing involved and the fact that the orange is out of season, makes this ingredient the most carbon intensive of the meal.

Margarine/canola oil

Canola Production In Canada

74% is of Becel margarine is made up of canola oil, so I will assume that is the most Significant ingredient in terms of fuel contribution. The canola oil that I used for frying my egg is Crisco oil, which says that it uses only Canadian seed as its input. The overwhelming majority of Canadian canola crops are located in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba, but there is a tiny amount of canola production in hope, BC as well. However this BC production also has to move through processing plants in Alberta, so it is safe to say that at the very least the canola has travelled 1000 km by truck to Victoria, and possibly twice that amount if it has been harvested in Manitoba.

When thinking about the oil burned to grow my canola crop, I initially thought of the fertilizer to grow them and the tractors to harvest them. But here are some other inputs that I read from the BC ministry of Agriculture website that I didn’t consider[8];

Shipping the pesticides to the farms, fuel for crop dusting planes, the fossil fuel it takes to keep the human farmers alive and well to tend to their crops (the cycle continues) inspectors driving to the farns to inspect grain, and the fossil fuels burned that are assosicated with the commercial aspect of the process- ie. “selling” the crop.

The production of canola seed into canola oil has many steps, and from looking at the video below, is a highly energy intensive process.

How Its made- Canola Oil

Whew! Only one meal took me hours to research and speculate on. I think for the next two meals I will be more general in my descriptions in where my food came from. All this work has made me hungry, so I think il make myself a snack. Thankfully my measurements are based off of Wednesdays food intake- otherwise I would be scared to eat more in fear of making more work for myself!

Here is a map of everywhere that my food came from:

So far my food intake hasn’t been too bad, at least in comparison to what I fear may be in store for the next meals. I’ve managed to stay basically in North America so far, with the farthest transportation being for oranges from Florida. Lunch and dinner to come!

Hello everyone, and welcome to my blog! I am super pumped to do some research into where my food comes from.

Ever since the agriculture unit of this course I’ve been trying to have a more environmentally conscious diet, but I have found that a lot of times that it’s been difficult to measure how much of a difference these changes make. From the get go I wanted to start with only a moderate change in my diet and then re-evaluate to see how it was working out, both on my body as well as the impact of the diet. I would still eat meat but I would eat less, and the meat that I did have would be more fish and chicken rather than meat from ruminating animals. I would try to have the large component of my meal consist of grains, vegetables and fruits, and when I could I would make an effort to buy more local and organic.

My thought process behind this was environmental as well as health related. I agree with the point that Wendall Berry brought up in “the Agrarian Standard” about the merits of being more connected and agriculturally accountable to the food a person consumes. I wanted to eat a less carbon and land intensive diet, in the hopes that I would bring my food consumption closer to a responsible level for one person. I figured that the best thing to do was change my habits in baby steps and not make a big change right at the start, because I would probably get discouraged quickly and give up on it. Plus, less red meat and more fresh vegetables and grains I would more closely align my diet with the one that Nutrition Canada purports is the healthiest balance, especially when substituting red meat for fish.

However, with only a vague idea (let alone a plan) on how specifically I would alter my diet to reflect this, I had a lot of questions about what the best way of meeting my agrarian goals would be. What is an acceptable fossil fuel and arable land level that I can strive to be under with my food consumption? How much fossil fuels did organic products use as opposed to non-organic? How many of my favorite foods, such as avocado and pineapple, would I allow myself to “cheat” on my goal of eating local?

Was a diet of mostly fish really less impactful on the environment? I had banked on the fact that if I bought fresh, wild seafood that was ocean wise, then it would use less arable land and still be an improvement from other forms of meat. Plus, I’m all for increasing the demand for the fishing industry in BC. In my opinion it is an important business alternative to the oil and pipeline projects in terms of jobs and money for the province, because the seafood industry relies on having clean oceans and rivers and a strong aquatic habitat. However after a while I started to wonder how much fossil fuel the fishing industry uses to fish and transport their catch. This could change my views on how relatively sustainable I assumed local fish was.

Keeping the original goal of this blog in mind, I hope that I can answer all of these questions at least somewhat while still answering the main question of how much oil I have eaten in a given day. More details about my 24 hour food consumption to come.