an important announcement and THE OIL WE EAT.

the Following text is from a previous post I made to another blog...long story short, I have been blogging two different blogs and didn't know it...since March...

so I'm consolidating. If you go to http://www.jonritz.blogspot.com you'll find a link redirecting you back here. . .

The following is copied from a previous post I made to jonritz.blogspot.com but wanted to copy it here because I think it's an important post, and because I'll be using this site primarily.

Monday, June 06, 2005

Food Wars!

I want to start by saying I wish there was a dipshit guard on the back button of my browser. About a ten minutes ago I was doing this the first time. But like a dumbass I clicked the back button on my browser and lost all the unsaved data. There was even a warning that I glanced at and clicked okay. The warning only registered AFTER the impulse to my finger to click OK. so here's try two. Lesson: SAVE AS DRAFT.

Boing Boing linked to The Oil Drum which is a blog dedicated to stuff like the Oil Peak. Good info.
Then, from a link on that site I found "A good primer on the subject of peak oil..."
one of the replies came from Acheron who provided an amazing link to this Harper's Bazaar article "Posted on Friday, July 23, 2004. Originally from Harper's Magazine, February 2004. By Richard Manning."

Excerpts from Manning's article about the many gallons of oil that go into the production and delivery of the processed foods we eat (with commentary):
While I agree with the first half of this paragraph,
"If you follow the energy, eventually you will end up in a field somewhere. Humans engage in a dizzying array of artifice and industry. Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity’s cut of primary productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since humans domesticated these grains, their status has remained undiminished, most likely because they are able to store solar energy in uniquely dense, transportable bundles of carbohydrates." But when he writes:
"They are to the plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world. Indeed, aside from hydrocarbons they are the most concentrated form of true wealth—sun energy—to be found on the planet." I'm not sure if you can say the mere carbohydrate storage capacity is the only measure of sun-energy concentration viable:

"The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil, not food. "

Woah. Wake up! Hint hint: N.
"The chemophobia of modern times excludes fear of the simple elements of chemistry’s periodic table."

Just to get warmed up: "America’s biggest crop, grain corn, is completely unpalatable. It is raw material for an industry that manufactures food substitutes. Likewise, you can’t eat unprocessed wheat. You certainly can’t eat hay. You can eat unprocessed soybeans, but mostly we don’t. These four crops cover 82 percent of American cropland. Agriculture in this country is not about food; it’s about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy to become food." (most italics added)

TEN CALORIES OF OIL FOR ONE CALORIE OF FOOD? "Animal rights aside, vegetarians can lose the edge in the energy argument by eating processed food, with its ten calories of fossil energy for every calorie of food energy produced." ten:one = not good.

The kicker: "There is another energy matter to consider here, though. The grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. That number does not include the fuel used in transporting the food from the factory to a store near you, or the fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores on the edge of town, where the land is cheap."

SOLUTION? "Green eaters, especially vegetarians, advocate eating low on the food chain, a simple matter of energy flow."

BAM! "Eighty percent of the grain the United States produces goes to livestock. Seventy-eight percent of all of our beef comes from feed lots, where the cattle eat grain, mostly corn and wheat. So do most of our hogs and chickens. The cattle spend their adult lives packed shoulder to shoulder in a space not much bigger than their bodies, up to their knees in shit, being stuffed with grain and a constant stream of antibiotics to prevent the disease this sort of confinement invariably engenders. The manure is rich in nitrogen and once provided a farm’s fertilizer. The feedlots, however, are now far removed from farm fields, so it is simply not “efficient” to haul it to cornfields. It is waste. It exhales methane, a global-warming gas. It pollutes streams. It takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef this way; sixty-eight to make one calorie of pork." sixty-eight : one = not good at all

I concur : "I live among elk and have learned to respect them. One moonlit night during the dead of last winter, I looked out my bedroom window to see about twenty of them grazing a plot of grass the size of a living room. Just that small patch among acres of other species of native prairie grass. Why that species and only that species of grass that night in the worst of winter when the threat to their survival was the greatest? What magic nutrient did this species alone contain? What does a wild animal know that we don’t? I think we need this knowledge."

posted by Jon Ritz @ 8:41 PM