Environmental Sustainability, Gas & Food

Environmental sustainability is a balancing act. It balances nature with nurture, time and space, nutrient to erosion.

Organic food and sustainable agriculture can go hand in hand. Using sustainable practices like mulching, crop rotation and animals instead of gas-powered trucks, a farmer could literally work on an almost net-zero carbon emission. And yes, it might cost us a little more for that ear of corn, but as I'll explain, it's totally worth it.

Bryant University has a great report that compares the cost of food over time. Just one hundred years ago, the average consumer spent 29.2% of his weekly income on food.  In 1980, he spent 9.6% of his income in food. That is a significant drop. It did not specify the percentage we spend today on food, but I have heard reports that it's between 9-10%, about the same as  in 1980.

The fact is that our industrial food system is completely subsidized by oil. Oil in the trucks that seed far faster than hands could ever sow; trucks that collect, haul; machines that thresh, wash,  water, till, and spray fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides.

In 1910, The United States used about 7 quadrillion units of BTU (British Thermal Units). A quadrillion is this many: 1,000,000,000,000,000. It's an incomprehensible number even at seven. In 2005, we used 345 quadrillion units of BTU [1] and the United States only houses 4% of the entire world population.

Excessive is maybe an understatement.

It doesn't really stop there, either. We can calculate the excess in another way: calories. Calories are simply units of energy. In vegetable matter, it is the amount of energy a plant absorbs from the sun. Discovery Health says: "One gallon of gasoline has the equivalent energy of 31,000,000 (31 million) calories. Specifically, a calorie is the amount of energy, or heat, it takes to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit)."

A head of Romaine lettuce is about 50 calories; therefore, 1 gallon of gasoline has the same equivalent of energy as 620,000 heads of romaine.

Think about how many people that could feed. The average human eats between 1200 - 2000 calories a day to sustain a healthy body. The equivalent of 1 gallon of gasoline in calories could feed (using an average of 1600 calories) 19,375 people.

Nashville, Tennessee, in populace terms, is right in the middle of the United states with about 600,000 people. About 32 gallons of gas would cover the caloric need for the entire city of Nashville.

When we consider the amount of gas (oil) we use to create food, cook it, store it, clean it, and ultimately, flush it, we're talking about consuming far, far more than we ever give thought about when we're in the supermarket checkout lane.

So consider paying a little more at the farmer's market or buying organic. It may be the only real route to environmental sustainability.

Photo credit: Public Domain

1. Congressional Record - House, Vol 151, Pt. 4