- how far has the food travelled? our dependence on oil means that on average our food travels over 2400km (Barbara Kingsolver: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, p5) (see also this study by the Leopold Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, Iowa State U.), using up 7 times more calories than the food yields (U. Michigan, Centre for Sustainable Systems), and even more - 11-15 times the yield - when we're talking about meat (Living in the Environment, 1st Canadian Ed., 2008)
- how much grain has the meat I'm buying been fed (7 kg of grain makes 1 kg of feedlot beef; 4 kg of grain makes 1 kg of pork; 2.2 kg of grain makes 1 kg of chicken), to say nothing of the antibiotics it's been fed to get it to grow bigger and faster than it normally would (Paul Roberts: the End of Food)?
- though it's more expensive, I buy non-clay cat litter for our cats, because the clay used is actually being strip-mined in a way that not only devastates local ecosystems and vast areas of land, but is also non-renewable
- what kinds of pesticides do I think may have been used on the produce? I don't know any specifics, but I have heard, for instance, that apples are grown with a ton of pesticides. Better to buy organic. Bananas, on the other hand, are reportedly dipped in gasoline to help preserve them and ripen them at just the right time (after their long journey).
- is it better to buy beans and peas dried and add water, thereby reducing metals used in cans and the preservatives we add, or is it better to buy the cans so you don't waste water and energy re-hydrating and then boiling them before use?
- how high on the food chain am I eating? Citing the second law of thermodynamics (energy is always lost during a conversion from one form to another), if I try to eat less meat and consume things lower on the food chain and closer to the ground (so-to-speak), I can reduce the amount of CO2 my consumption is contributing to the atmosphere...
- can I afford to buy fair-trade coffee this week? how much do I trust President's Choice's new organic & fair trade labels? How is it possible such a huge company is really making such changes? (see http://www.blackgoldmovie.com for an excellent discussion about the so-called "fair trade" coffee industry)
...there are more. Tonight I "had to" go to a grocery store further than our local one because it has longer hours, and when I got there I was really almost panicky about the obvious ignorance of the other shoppers around me, buying boxes of crazy processed foods with ingredients you can't pronounce, and apparently not thinking at all about how their lives are soon going to have to change because of the inevitable meteoric rise in the price of oil and the subsequently monumental decisions our fossil-fuel-dependent society is going to have to make about how we live. I find it hard to breathe in malls for the same reason.
So What?
But so why should you care, even though I've developed this slow-paced, fairly obsessive relationship with the food I purchase? Well, because, together with the decline in oil production (signalling and end to cheap oil) and our exploding population (worldwide @ 6.9 billion today, expected to double by about 2025), the Green Revolution is going to become a thing of the past - we are only able to get as much food from the ground as we do now because of petrochemicals; without them, our fertilizers and pesticides will disappear. And so, in short, we're entering an era when food is about to become scarce, and our methods of producing food are going to have to be re-thought. Additionally, all that fossil fuel energy we are using to produce our food is contributing to greenhouse gases (methane, CO2, ozone, etc.), which is warming our planet, creating a positive feedback loop. And that's just scratching the surface...
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