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