Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

An eye-opener about growing and eating local.
paul, tradingpost@riseup.net
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    My Saudi Arabian Breakfast
    By Chad Heeter
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=71299

    Please join me for breakfast. It's time to fuel up again.

    On the table in my small Berkeley apartment this particular morning is a 
healthy looking little meal -- a bowl of imported McCann's Irish oatmeal 
topped with Cascadian Farms organic frozen raspberries, and a cup of Peet's 
Fair Trade Blend coffee. Like most of us, I prepare my breakfast at home and 
the ingredients for this one probably cost me about $1.25. (If I went to a 
café in downtown Berkeley, I'd likely have to add another $6.00, plus tip for 
the same.)

    My breakfast fuels me up with about 400 calories, and it satisfies me. 
So, for just over a buck and half an hour spent reading the morning paper in 
my own kitchen, I'm energized for the next few hours. But before I put spoon 
to cereal, what if I consider this bowl of oatmeal porridge (to which I've 
just added a little butter, milk, and a shake of salt) from a different 
perspective. Say, a Saudi Arabian one.

    Then, what you'd be likely to see -- what's really there, just hidden 
from our view (not to say our taste buds) -- is about four ounces of crude 
oil. Throw in those luscious red raspberries and that cup of java (another 
three ounces of crude), and don't forget those modest additions of butter, 
milk, and salt (another ounce), and you've got a tiny bit of the Middle East 
right here in my kitchen.

    Now, let's drill a little deeper into this breakfast. Just where does 
this tiny gusher of oil actually come from? (We'll let this oil represent all 
fossil fuels in my breakfast, including natural gas and coal.)

    Nearly 20% of this oil went into growing my raspberries on Chilean farms 
many thousands of miles away, those oats in the fields of County Kildare, 
Ireland, and that specially-raised coffee in Guatemala -- think tractors as 
well as petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides.

    The next 40% of my breakfast fossil-fuel equation is burned up between 
the fields and the grocery store in processing, packaging, and shipping.

    Take that box of McCann's oatmeal. On it is an inviting image of pure, 
healthy goodness -- a bowl of porridge, topped by two peach slices. Scattered 
around the bowl are a handful of raw oats, what look to be four acorns, and 
three fresh raspberries. Those raw oats are actually a reminder that the 
flakes require a few steps twixt field and box. In fact, a visit to McCann's 
website illustrates each step in the cleaning, steaming, hulling, cutting, 
and rolling that turns the raw oats into edible flakes. Those five essential 
steps require significant energy costs.

    Next, my oat flakes go into a plastic bag (made from oil), which is in 
turn inserted into an energy-intensive, pressed wood-pulp, printed paper box. 
Only then does my "breakfast" leave Ireland and travel over 5,000 
fuel-gorging, CO2-emitting miles by ship and truck to my grocery store in 
California.

    Coming from another hemisphere, my raspberries take an even longer 
fossil-fueled journey to my neighborhood. Though packaged in a plastic bag 
labeled Cascadian Farms (which perhaps hints at a birthplace in the good old 
Cascade mountains of northwest Washington), the small print on the back, 
stamped "A Product of Chile," tells all -- and what it speaks of is a 
5,800-mile journey to Northern California.

    If you've been adding up percentages along the way, perhaps you've 
noticed that a few tablespoons of crude oil in my bowl have not been 
accounted for. That final 40% of the fossil fuel in my breakfast is used up 
by the simple acts of keeping food fresh and then preparing it. In home 
kitchens and restaurants, the chilling in refrigerators and the cooking on 
stoves using electricity or natural gas gobbles up more energy than you might 
imagine.

    For decades, scientists have calculated how much fossil fuel goes into 
our food by measuring the amount of energy consumed in growing, packing, 
shipping, consuming, and finally disposing of it. The "caloric input" of 
fossil fuel is then compared to the energy available in the edible product, 
the "caloric output."

    What they've discovered is astonishing. According to researchers at the 
University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Agriculture, an average of 
over seven calories of fossil fuel is burned up for every calorie of energy 
we get from our food. This means that in eating my 400 calorie breakfast, I 
will, in effect, have "consumed" 2,800 calories of fossil-fuel energy. (Some 
researchers claim the ratio to be as high as ten to one.)

    But this is only an average. My cup of coffee gives me only a few 
calories of energy, but to process just one pound of coffee requires over 
8,000 calories of fossil-fuel energy -- the equivalent energy found in nearly 
a quart of crude oil, 30 cubic feet of natural gas, or around two and a half 
pounds of coal.

    So how do you gauge how much oil went into your food?

    First check out how far it traveled. The further it traveled, the more 
oil it required. Next, gauge how much processing went into the food. A fresh 
apple is not processed, but Kellogg's Apple Jacks cereal requires enormous 
amounts of energy to process. The more processed the food, the more oil it 
required. Then consider how much packaging is wrapped around your food. Buy 
fresh vegetables instead of canned, and buy bulk beans, grains, and flour if 
you want to reduce that packaging.

    By now, you're thinking that you're in the clear, because you eat 
strictly organically-grown foods. When it comes to fossil-fuel calculations 
though, the manner in which food's grown is where differences stop. Whether 
conventionally-grown or organically-grown, a raspberry is shipped, packed, 
and chilled the same way.

    Yes, there are some savings from growing organically, but possibly only 
of a slight nature. According to a study by David Pimentel at Cornell 
University, 30% of fossil-fuel expenditure on farms growing conventional 
(non-organic) crops is found in chemical fertilizer. This 30% is not consumed 
on organic farms, but only if the manure used as fertilizer is produced in 
very close proximity to the farm. Manure is a heavy, bulky product. If farms 
have to truck bulk manure for any distance over a few miles, the savings are 
eaten up in diesel-fuel consumption, according to Pimentel. One source of 
manure for organic farmers in California is the chicken producer Foster 
Farms. Organic farmers in Monterey County, for example, will have to truck 
tons of Foster's manure from their main plant in Livingston, Ca. to fields 
over one hundred miles away.

    So the next time we're at the grocer, do we now have to ask not only 
where and how this product was grown, but how far its manure was shipped?

    Well, if you're in New York City picking out a California-grown tomato 
that was fertilized with organic compost made from kelp shipped from Nova 
Scotia, maybe it's not such a bad question. But should we give up on organic? 
If you're buying organic raspberries from Chile each week, then yes. The fuel 
cost is too great, as is the production of the greenhouse gases along with 
it. Buying locally-grown foods should be the first priority when it comes to 
saving fossil fuel.

    But if there were really truth in packaging, on the back of my oatmeal 
box where it now tells me how many calories I get from each serving, it would 
also tell me how many calories of fossil fuels went into this product. On a 
scale from one to five -- with one being non-processed, locally-grown 
products and five being processed, packaged imports -- we could quickly 
average the numbers in our shopping cart to get a sense of the ecological 
footprint of our diet. From this we would gain a truer sense of the 
miles-per-gallon in our food.

    What appeared to be a simple, healthy meal of oatmeal, berries, and 
coffee looks different now. I thought I was essentially driving a Toyota 
Prius hybrid -- by having a very fuel-efficient breakfast, but by the end of 
the week I've still eaten the equivalent of over two quarts of Valvoline. 
From the perspective of fossil-fuel consumption, I now look at my breakfast 
as a waste of precious resources. And what about the mornings that I head to 
Denny's for a Grand-Slam breakfast: eggs, pancakes, bacon, sausage? On those 
mornings -- forget about fuel efficiency -- I'm driving a Hummer.

    What I eat for breakfast connects me to the planet, deep into its past 
with the fossilized remains of plants and animals which are now fuel, as well 
as into its future, when these non-renewable resources will likely be in 
scant supply. Maybe these thoughts are too grand to be having over breakfast, 
but I'm not the only one on the planet eating this morning. My meal traveled 
thousands of miles around the world to reach my plate. But then there's the 
rise of perhaps 600 million middle-class Indians and Chinese. They're already 
demanding the convenience of packaged meals and the taste of foreign flavors. 
What happens when middle-class families in India or China decide they want 
their Irish oats for breakfast, topped by organic raspberries from Chile? 
They'll dip more and more into the planet's communal oil well. And someday 
soon, we'll all suck it dry.

    Chad Heeter grew up eating fossil fuels in Lee's Summit, Missouri. He's a 
freelance writer, documentary filmmaker, and a former high school science 
teacher.