By DAVE STEELE

Have you ever considered how much oil goes into your food? 

No, not olive oil or corn oil or even palm oil. Have you ever considered how much crude oil — how much petroleum — we’re using to feed ourselves? 

It’s no small matter. 

According to Cornell University’s David Pimentel, we North Americans use an average of ten calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food energy. Feeding just one of us takes about 1600 litres of fossil fuel each year. For me, at least, that’s more than I use driving my car.

Where does all that oil go? Well, surprisingly, most of it doesn’t go into food transportation. Moving our food around uses only about 256 of those 1600 litres. That’s not insignificant, of course. A USDA study of 16 fresh fruits and vegetables sold in a small Maryland town found that they travelled, on average, over 2400 kilometres to get there. And the processed foods we’ve come to depend on travel even further. Fertilizers avoidably use up 496 of those litres — it’s amazing how much oil goes into keeping our mistreated soils productive. Tractors and combines burn oil, too. And food processing, even more. And don’t forget the energy we use cooking our food. But this sort of accounting misses a very big part of the picture. 

In large measure, North Americans eat oil in their meat. Citing Pimentel again, it takes six kilograms of plant protein to produce one kilogram of animal protein; on average, eight times as much fossil fuel is required to produce animal protein than the plant equivalent. Over 50 percent of our annual grain production is fed to animals who are later eaten. The way we "raise meat," it takes 28 calories of fossil fuel input to generate one calorie of food value.

The rest of the oil we eat comes mostly in processed, packaged foods. Even vegetarian processed foods require some ten calories of fossil fuel input for every calorie of food value. Beyond the energy used to grow the grain, it takes the equivalent of two litres of gasoline to produce the contents of your average box of breakfast cereal. The packaging consumes even more oil to manufacture that plastic and paper you’re going to throw away anyway.

Honestly, this is insane. In burning all this oil, we’re pumping more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We’re warming the planet. We’re conducting a giant, foolish experiment. Paradoxical as it may sound, what’s worst may be that we can’t keep it up. The oil fields are going to dry up, and they’re going to dry up in this century. Sooner or later we won’t have any oil left to "eat." If we’re going to feed ourselves in the long term, we’re going to have to learn to eat without oil.

What can I do about it?

• Eat low on the food chain. For a rough rule of thumb, consider that each step up that chain — from plants, to animals, to animals fed with other animals — requires a ten-fold increase in energy input. That's why farmed salmon are nightmare energy consumers. They’re two steps up the chain because they’re fed the ground up remains of other fish, which are caught at the expense of using yet more fossil fuel.
• Buy local. Frequent your local farmer’s market. Supermarkets and their suppliers treat food purely as a commodity. They move it great distances if that will maximize their profits. They’re not concerned about where that food came from or how much fuel it took to get there, so long as it serves their bottom line.
• Buy in season. We’re spoiled. We expect fresh produce year round. It's far better to rely on local crops, even in winter. Root crops keep well throughout the year; home canning in reusable bottles is relatively energy inexpensive compared to trucking cross-continent, often in throw-away cans.
• Buy organic. Doing so not only cuts oil input by nearly a third (for fresh vegetables, at least), but it’s healthier to boot: a win-win situation.
• Avoid processed foods and even packaged foods. As discussed above, they’re a major energy hog.
• If you must buy food from afar, try to buy shipped food. Ocean shipping uses six times less energy than land transport; fifty times less than air freight.
• Think for yourself. Consider what you’re really doing whenever you buying anything, be it food for your table or that toy for your little one. It’s only by being conscious of the wider consequences of our consumer choices that we can hope to make this a better world.