After starting this blog yesterday, I started poking around online to see what I could find about sustainability issues. One thing that popped up repeatedly was the amount of energy it takes to produce our food. It got me thinking how completely holistic (as in whole systems) our approach to sustainability needs to be.
This article on Sustainable Business.com puts it in familiar terms:
It takes about 10 fossil fuel calories to produce each food calorie in the average American diet. So if your daily food intake is 2,000 calories, then it took 20,000 calories to grow that food and get it to you. In more familiar units, this means that growing, processing and delivering the food consumed by a family of four each year requires the equivalent of almost 34,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy, or more than 930 gallons of gasoline (for comparison, the average U.S. household annually consumes about 10,800 kWh of electricity, or about 1,070 gallons of gasoline).
In other words, we use about as much energy to grow our food as to power our homes or fuel our cars.
We have to eat, right? So what's the point? The article suggests that there are several things you can do to reduce the amount of energy it takes to put food on your table. Here's the nutshell version:
1. Eat lower on the food chain. It takes several times more energy to produce meat than fruits and vegetables.
2. Eat more fresh foods and fewer processed foods.
3. Buy local. The food items in a U.S. grocery store have traveled an average of 1500 miles. It takes energy to get it there.
--
Comments