by J. Michael Wheeler
If you’re a Foodie, the raison d'être of eating is, of course, the pleasure of it. There is, however, another reason to eat: nutrition. Really. We need to eat to live to eat another meal. We need energy to eat (and to do other things like food shopping and cooking, too). The unit that we use to measure this energy is the calorie. A calorie is the amount of energy required to raise one cubic centimeter of water by one degree Centigrade.
Well okay, but the thing to remember is that energy is energy and a calorie is a way to measure it. That’s what it means when your diet soda has only one calorie. It will give you only one calorie of energy. And an interesting question, from a green perspective, is how much energy did it take to bring that one calorie of energy to you?
Researchers at Cornell University have calculated the fossil fuel calories in the foods we consume. In other words, how much gas, coal, oil, and other fossil fuels, measured in calories, does it take to bring food items to our table? It goes like this:
A can of diet soda has one calorie of food energy. It takes 600 calories of fossil energy to produce that carbonated drink. It takes another 1,600 calories of fossil energy to put that drink into an aluminum can.
So it takes 2,200 calories of fossil energy to bring you one calorie of food energy. Americans consume, on average, 600 cans of soda per year. That means that it takes 1,320,000 calories of fossil energy yearly to produce just 600 calories of food energy! Whoa.
Bigger picture: what does this mean, green? It means that making small changes in our eating habits can have profound effects on our fossil fuel consumption. And that means an easy way for each of us to lower our carbon footprint.
Each can of soda you don’t drink can save thousands of fossil fuel calories. Eating a veggie meal once or twice a week rather than animal protein is a lower carbon footprint meal. (While transportation produces about 13 percent of the planet's greenhouse gases, food production from farm animals produces about 18 percent of global warming emissions.)
Bruce Gellerman, on the radio program Living on Earth, 9.12.08, talked with Professor David Pimentel of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University about his study calculating the fossil fuel calories of the food we consume. The study looks at many of our food consuming habits. Part of the study, Dr. Pimentel tells us, is the
…data on the average number of times that people shop per week to get their groceries home, the size automobile, the quantity of groceries they bring home, the distance they travel and so forth. It takes almost as much fossil energy to get that can of corn home from the grocery store as there is energy in the corn that's in the can itself.
The total energy per person used in the food system in the U.S. is 500 gallons of oil equivalents. And it is second only, as far as our use of oil in the food system, to the amount of fuel that we use per person in our automobiles.
To listen to the interview, click here. (If you are interested in our planet’s health, you should know about the radio program Living on Earth. It’s the weekly environmental program of news features, interviews and commentary on a broad range of ecological issues distributed by Public Radio International.)
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