Food Crisis and the Price of Oil

With food riots around the world and food inflation and restrictions hitting us here at home, people are thinking more about what they are eating. What we don’t spend enough time thinking about where our food comes from and the amount of oil that is consumed in the process.

The petroleum used in supplying food accounts for about one third of average per-capita oil consumption.

The cost of fuel has a direct impact on the cost of food, and the amount of fuel that we consume has a direct impact on it’s price. There has been a lot of talk of ways to increase production to lower the cost of oil, but ultimately that won’t work. Oil is a finite resource and increased production just means that an already dwindling supply with just get depleted sooner.

The only way to get the price of oil down is to consume less.

We tend to think only about fuel consumption when it comes to filling our tank. We don’t think about the tens of thousands of miles that all of the goods that we consume have to travel to get to our friendly neighborhood big box stores or supermarkets.

From a study published by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture:

“In the past 30 years there has been a significant global increase in fossil fuel use. One reason for the rise in U.S. fossil fuel use is the increased use of trucks to transport goods. In 1965, there were 787,000 combination trucks registered in the United States, and these vehicles consumed 6.658 billion gallons of fuel. In 1997, there were 1,790,000 combination trucks that used 20.294 billion gallons of fuel. Many of these trucks transport food throughout the United States. A recent study indicated that in California alone more than 485,000 truckloads of fresh fruit and vegetables leave the state every year and travel from 100 to 3,100 miles to reach their destinations.”

Your average tractor trailer gets about 6 miles per gallon. A load of romaine grown in northern California for consumption in New York City burns 516 gallons of fuel on the one way trip. With the national average cost of diesel at $4.14 per gallon that’s $2138 if fuel cost alone. Cost that is passed along to you.

That’s just transport, modern farms depend on petrochemical based fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, and diesel powered machines to plant, tend and harvest as well.

Thanks to creative trade deals, a huge portion of our foods are grown and processed in other countries and transported here via container ships. Container ships are powered by a particularly carcinogenic fuel known as Bunker Fuel, which is actually the residue that’s left over from crude oil refining process.

So what do we do? One thing is to buy locally produced food. With the Green trend that the kids seem so into these days, there is a renaissance of farmers markets, pick your owns, community gardens, and green grocers all over this country. Locally produced, organic foods are fresher, taste better, are better for you, and usually have a much lower percentage of strange chemicals in the form of ripening agents, poisons, preservatives, hormones etc.

It takes a little effort, and this means that if a certain item is not in season in your area, you may have to do without. The bulk of my produce, my dairy, and my meat traveled no more than 500 miles to get to my plate. And I live in the desert. If I can do it, so can you.

Find your local farmers market. http://www.localharvest.org/
Find a community garden. http://www.communitygarden.org/index.php

~ by takinitback on May 10, 2008.