History 106: Assignment 4: What We Don't See

            Some people have come to accept and understand that the food they eat at a restaurant or buy conveniently at a grocery store came from a farm far away; they have acknowledged the fact that consumption of food impacts the world.  It is important for us to remember that nothing is exempt from this fact. We are consumers and when we go out to buy and consume a product, we often don’t know or bother to find out what impact that consumption has on our planet.  William Rees’ ecological footprint is “a measure of human demand on the Earth’s ecosystems” (Davis, “Think Local, Very Local (Your Ecological Footprint)”). Human demand encompasses food as well as everything else that we need or ‘demand’. As an example, we look at a pair of Timberland boots which have a larger ‘ecological footprint’ than the shoe size tag in them.
            We might think that the carbon footprint we leave behind is the amount of gas we consumed driving to the store, but Jeffrey Ball’s article Six Products, Six Carbon Footprints points out that the carbon-footprint of a pair of boots is about 121 pounds. Where did all this come from and how did it all come about? The cartoon provides a brief picture for our examination.

Question: Where did the carbon-footprint come from?

(click to enlarge)

            First, it may be shocking to know that less than 5% of the carbon-footprint was actually from transportation. While it was necessary for the product to become accessible to us, the larger portion of the footprint came from how the boots were made. Second, according to Ball, Timberland’s factory in China’s Guangdong province contributes only 8.5 pounds of the 121 total.  While the factories might be consuming coal in its production of the boots, they also only accounts for a fraction of the carbon footprint.
            The 112.5 pounds comes from the raw materials that go into the boots: rubber, ethyl vinyl acetate (EVA), and leather (Ball, n. pag). Of these raw materials, leather is the biggest factor mainly because of the cows.  Ball points to the methane the cows produce which is a more damaging  gas to the atmosphere and can add up to the equivalent of four tons of carbon dioxide.

Question: How did this carbon-footprint happen?

            The short answer is because we wanted something – demand.  Resources were spent to give us what we were willing to pay for. Due to the demand of the boots, producers were paid enough to pay farmers enough to provide cows and other raw materials.  Therefore to dig deeper to the ‘how’ carbon footprints like this happened, we actually need to look at ourselves and the source of our demand.

The source of our seemingly endless consumption can arguably be a fruit of the industrial revolution and a by product of the progression of energy regimes. The industrial revolution helped humans harness different energies for work and allowed production to increase thereby also increasing personal wealth. The world was also made smaller as both humans and goods can travel distances in shorter periods of time.

All these changes led to the convenience of being able to get anything we want as consumers almost immediately.  Our changed view of demand resulted in a market economy which “turned natural resources into commodities … [leading] people to think of natural goods in increasingly abstract and uniform terms” (Davis, “Modernity and the Environment”). When we see the Timberland boots, we don’t see what went into the boots; we see only that it is right in front of us. The price tag is only cost we have become concerned about.

Ball, Jeffrey. “Six Products, Six Carbon Footprints.” Wall Street Journal Mar. 2009. Web. 20 Mar. 2012.

Davis, Brandon, et al. “Think Local, Very Local (Your Ecological Footprint).” History 106. Unit 1, Module   3. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. April 2. 2012. Online lecture.

Davis, Brandon, et al. “Modernity and the Environment” History 106. Unit 3, Module 6. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. April 4. 2012. Online lecture.

History 106 - Assignment 2: The Oil We Eat Blog

Hi reader!
I haven't been back here in a while but hopefully a school assignment maybe just what I need to get going. Hopefully my assignment can get you thinking about the food you eat as well.  I don't believe blogs should be long to read so I apologize in advance as this assignment requires me to be thorough. Here's how it shakes down:


"Blog our food consumption for 24 hours—reflect on the role of oil in its production (what’s in it and how was it produced?), delivery (where is it from and how did it get to you?), and packaging (what does/did it come in, and how was that produced)."  Also part of this assignment is an article by Richard Manning titled “The Oil We Eat: Following the Food Chain Back to Iraq” which I will be referring to from time to time.


I thought it would be better to reflect on the meals I eat on average rather than picking a certain day. Snacks aside (since their not a regular part of my day) I will focus on the 3 meals I normally have: breakfast, lunch and dinner.


Breakfast
Food consumed: A bowl of oats, a fruit or two (apples and bananas) or a couple of hard boiled eggs.


The easiest I believe to track down would be the fruit. Seeing as my family doesn't buy it from a local farmers market, it probably travelled all the way from a tropical country like Mexico packed in freights. The eggs, I would like to think, came from somewhere closer. If President's Choice commercials are any reliable then I am consuming Canada grade A eggs which may be from the local farms in the province. This means a shorter travel time inside trucks.  The oats may just be from the USA but one thing I learned from the Manning article is that there usually is a lot of processing that goes behind it. Fortunately most of the processing in oatmeal is in the packaging. Their fairly minimal in terms of food processing, meaning they still could count as a whole food.


Lunch and Dinner

Chicken Adobo

Food consumed: Rice with some sort of stew, in this case chicken adobo (a Filipino marinated dish)


Why am I combining these two together? Because as a student on a budget, lunch usually consist of what was leftover from dinner. The rice my family normally buys is basmati brown rice. It's rice that is grown normally in India, Bangladesh or Pakistan. This means that the rice has been on a longer trip than I've ever been. Not a plus for me as a consumer but the rice I eat really travels. I hope that the chicken I ate made up for it.  Though I don't feed chickens in my backyard (as approved by the city of Vancouver), my ready to cook chicken likely and hopefully came from the same place my eggs came from, somewhere in BC.  The marinate I used is a simple mix of vinegar, ginger and soy sauce which may have done some travelling of their own either locally or all the way from China depending on the soy sauce brand.


Where's the oil? 
As Manning points out, we consume barrels of oil when we consume our food. No we don't drink oil but it is energy that we expend nonetheless.  Delivery, where oil is more obviously consumed due to transportation, has been covered above. While I have no idea how the food listen above is exactly produced (thanks to the supermarkets), we can take a look at packaging. 


My oats, and eggs were packed in paper/carton which may or may not be made of recycled material where a mill would have used oil to shape paper pulp into those containers. They then would have to be shipped to the oats and egg farms to be used for packaging. The fruits may have come as they are in the grocery store but like the oats and eggs they were boxed up in a cardboard box. 

Don't worry, we're not actually eating oil . Are we?

The chicken is only product that uses plastic. While I'm sure the plastic also used oil to produce, here's a stomach churning video of how chickens are packaged from youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gywa-Yw-F78


If Manning is indeed correct, then I am consuming more than 30,000 calories of fossil fuel per day. Scary thought. Do the prices we pay for food reflect all this consumption? If it actually does then it explains why no one is more concerned with the environment.





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