Fossil Food: Consuming
Our Future
By Tom Starrs
Tom Starrs is vice
president and chief operating officer of the Bonneville Environmental
Foundation.
I spend a fair amount
of time thinking about how to reduce my family's dependence on energy,
particularly energy derived from fossil fuels. I commute to work by
bicycle or bus, install compact fluorescents when light bulbs burn
out, replace major appliances with the most efficient ones I can
afford, and cast jealous glances at my friends who drive hybrids or
alternative-fueled vehicles. But until recently, I didn't think of
myself as an energy glutton simply because of the food I eat.
Then I read an
astonishing statistic: It takes about 10 fossil fuel calories to
produce and transport each food calorie in the average American diet.
So if your daily food intake is 2,000 calories, then it took 20,000
calories to grow that food and get it to you. That 20,000 calories of
energy is embedded in the food. In more familiar units, this means
that growing, processing, and delivering the food consumed by a family
of four requires the equivalent each year of almost 34,000
kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy, or more than 930 gallons of gasoline
(for comparison, the average U.S. household annually consumes about
10,800 kWh of electricity, and about 1,070 gallons of gasoline).
In other words, we
use more than three times as much energy to obtain our food as to fuel
our homes (nearly as much as we use to fuel our cars).
The power of this equation is
especially revealing when applied to school lunch. According to
2005 USDA National School Lunch Program participation figures, 29.6
million American school children were served nearly five billion meals
at school last year. Typically these meals are highly processed,
filled with conditioners, preservatives, dyes, salts, artificial
flavors, and sweeteners. Usually they're individually portioned and
packaged, and travel thousands of miles to the school cafeteria.
School meals are
commonly delivered frozen, wrapped and sealed in energy-consumptive
packaging, and in need of some interval in a warming oven to thaw
before being served to students. Studies of packaging and plate waste
in school cafeterias indicate that, every day, as much as half, by
weight, of these hasty, unappetizing, low-nutrient, highly processed
and packaged meals is tossed by students - unopened, unappreciated,
untasted, unrecycled and uncomposted. The energy needed to collect and
transport the waste generated by school lunch must also be added to
the net energy embedded in the meal.
Overall, about 15
percent of U.S. energy goes to supplying Americans with food, split
roughly equally between crop and livestock production and food
processing and packaging. David Pimentel, a professor of ecology and
agricultural science at Cornell University, has estimated that if all
humanity ate the way Americans eat, we would exhaust all known fossil
fuel reserves in just seven years.
The implications of
agricultural energy use for the environment are disturbing. According
to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agriculture
contributes over 20 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions,
including more than 20 percent of the CO2, 55 percent of the methane,
and 65 percent of the nitrous oxide. In addition, our energy-intensive
agriculture industry contributes substantially to soil erosion, loss
of wildlife habitat, degradation of water quality from chemical
runoff, and other adverse environmental impacts.
Much of the energy
embedded in our food comes from growing grains that require further
processing to be eaten. Producing a two-pound box of breakfast cereal,
for example, requires the equivalent of burning half a gallon of
gasoline. When cereal is served for breakfast at school, it tends to
come preportioned, presweetened, and shrink-wrapped in individual
plastic bowls with a plastic-sealed set of napkin and utensils, a
foil-sealed plastic cup of fruit in heavy syrup or another menu item,
and a waxed cardboard carton of slightly sweetened fluid milk. This
configuration of packaging and consumables is served up millions of
times a day, five days a week, to our nation’s school children.
Eating high on the
food chain has other severe implications. Eating a carrot or an apple
gives the diner all the caloric energy in those foods, but feeding
these foods to a pig in the production of meat reduces the energy
available by a factor of 10. That's because the pig uses most of the
energy just staying alive, and stores only a fraction of the energy of
the apple in the parts we eat. All told, it takes 68 calories of
fossil fuel to produce one calorie of pork, and 35 calories of fuel to
make one calorie of beef.
Interestingly, the
path to reducing the energy intensity of the food system dovetails
nicely with the path to a healthy and nutritious diet. It also fits
with educating our children for a future worth living on a tolerable
planet. It can be summarized in three simple suggestions.
First, eat lower on
the food chain. That means eating more fruits and vegetables, and
fewer meats and fish. Meats, poultry, and fish contain necessary
proteins, but most American diets contain too much protein - about
twice the recommended amount. Since about 80 percent of grain
production currently goes to feeding livestock, the amount of energy
used indirectly to support our diet of double bacon cheeseburgers is
staggering. If you eat meat, then try to avoid animals grown in
feedlots or factory pens. They take far more energy calories to raise
than do free-range, grass-fed critters, which have only about a third
of the embedded energy.
Second, eat more
fresh foods in their whole state, and fewer processed foods. Fruits
and vegetables, but also whole grains, legumes, and other
less-processed foods, have much less embedded energy. In general, the
more packaging, the more processing - and the more energy associated
with its production.
Third, buy local.
Incredibly, the typical food item on U.S. grocery store shelves has
traveled an average of 1,500 miles. And some foods are much worse.
Table grapes grown in Chile, transported by ship to California, and
shipped by truck to Iowa have traveled over 4,200 miles. In response,
some agricultural scientists have proposed ecolabeling programs based
on CO2 rankings or broader lifecycle assessments.
These analyses
provide better information than just miles traveled. For instance,
because they travel by air rather than by ship, Hawaiian pineapples
are among the most carbon-intensive of foods, contributing about 40
pounds of CO2 per pound of pineapple. That is about 10 times the next
highest figure among the foods studied.
Farm-to-school
programs that underscore local procurement of fresh, sustainably grown
foods and school meals that emphasize whole ingredients cooked from
scratch are systemic solutions that begin to solve problems in health,
education, and the environment. In my hometown of Portland, Oregon
individuals, schools, and businesses alike are starting to recognize
and respond to the public's concerns about fossil food. Grocery stores
featuring locally grown and organic products are common. Farm stands,
farmers' markets, and community-supported agriculture operations are
thriving. Here, even fast food restaurants are turning to local and
organic ingredients.
Supporting fresh,
locally grown, minimally processed food through our school meal
programs will help our kids lead healthier, happier lives. After all,
every kid knows the expression: “You are what you eat!”
Tom Starrs is vice
president and chief operating officer of the Bonneville Environmental
Foundation (www.b-e-f.org), a charitable and nonprofit corporation
dedicated to encouraging and funding activities and projects that lead
to greater reliance on clean, environmentally preferred renewable
power and to healthy, sustainable fish and wildlife habitat in the
Pacific Northwest. He can be reached at
tomstarrs@b-e-f.org <mailto:tomstarrs@b-e-f.org>.
An earlier version of this article was published in Solar Today, the
award-winning magazine of the American Solar Energy Society (www.solartoday.org).
Our mission is to promote community environmental, social and economic
well-being by joining together and mobilizing residents and
organizations of Washington to create a sustainable food and farming
system.
