The Price of Gas: Stop Eating Petroleum

Shop Your Local Farmers Market and Save Fuel

 

As I write this, gasoline is topping $3.50 a gallon.  According to quite a number of media reports, by the time you read this, that price could be well on its way to $4 in time for peak summer travel season.  That’s like $50 for most folks to fill the tank of gas.

Ouch.

When you think about the relationship between gas prices and food shopping, the first thing that probably comes to mind is the gas you put in your car’s tank.  Rising prices may mean that you become more conscious about the efficiency of your shopping trips, hitting all your errands on the same drive in as your grocery-gathering trip to local supermarkets or area box stores.

But the fact is, you are consuming far more gasoline with the products in your shopping cart than you are in your car’s gas tank.   No, I don’t mean you are actually eating oil – though you are, in small amounts. Rather, the amount of petroleum required to grow and, more importantly, to ship, much of the food you are purchasing is astronomical. 

According to Kitchen Gardeners International, a Maine-based global home-food growing movement (www.kitchengardeners.org), “Ingredients for the average meal travel between 1000-2500 miles from field to table, 25% farther than they did 2 decades ago, using up to 17 times more fossil fuels than a meal made with local ingredients.”  And while in 1907 between a third and a half of the food consumed in the United States was home-grown on farms and in gardens, today 100 years later, that figure is nearly zero.  

The Idea Was Suburban Homesteads

The original concept for suburban development was the notion of “for every man, a farm.”  The point was to enfranchise people by ensuring that all were landowners, meaning that all had the inherent political power and freedom which comes from self-sufficiency: that half acre to five acre lot was originally envisioned as being used to grow all the produce, fruit, and small livestock and poultry a family could need, meaning citizens would not be reliant on government and corporate organization of food production and distribution. Land and food are wealth; the person who is growing much of their own food on land they own themselves can not be starved out, subjected to ‘clearances,’ or sent to forced labor in factories and mines, as happened time and again to the landless tenant classes of Europe.  

Ironically, today we have more landowners in the U.S. than ever before, and yet home food production has fallen to nil.  Those suburban lots have been turned over to lawn, itself a huge consumer of petroleum products and producer of little but pollution and the color green. Lawnmowers in the U.S. alone consume more than 800 million gallons of gas annually, and the EPA says 17 million gallons of gas are spilled in refueling mowers every year, which is more than was released in the Exxon Valdez disaster.  Studies indicate that an hour of mowing puts out as much air pollution as a 100-mile drive in an average sedan.  Use a hand mower.  Stop mowing and plant flowers for bees.  It’s not laziness.  It’s good global citizenship.  Better yet, turn at least part of that lawn into a vegetable garden. And when you do go grocery shopping, buy local. 

Why ‘buy local’?  Why not just ‘buy organic’? 

 If you want the full-blown answer, pick up a copy of Michael Pollan’s newest book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.” A New York Times journalist and professor at U.S. Berkeley, Pollan set out to discover the roots and paths that led from ingredients to four different meals on his plate.  The first is a McDonald’s meal, and the last a dinner comprised almost exclusively of things Pollan hunted (a wild boar) and foraged (mushrooms, fruit hanging over a neighbor’s fence) himself.  In between are two farm-based meals. 

The book explores nearly every moral food question you can imagine, from the political economics of subsidized commercial corn and livestock feedyards, to vegetarianism, animal rights, and hunting.  (I use this book as a text for an Introduction to Ethics class I teach at a local community college.)  As a vegetarian of over 30 years who prefers organic when practical, I thought I already knew a lot of what there is to know about food production.  But Pollard’s well-researched assessment of commercial organic farms taught me a thing or two. 

Pollard visited the grounds of the two biggest organic produce growers in the U.S., Earthbound Farms and Cal-Organic. The good news is that he found these companies to be far better than most commercial agricultural operations in their pay scales and treatment of farm labor and business employees. And the other good news is that, of course, these operations are growing organically.  That means less petroleum-based pesticides are going into the ground, and you don’t have to worry about nasty trace chemicals left on the produce and going into your body or into your kids.  To those ends, the Cal-Organic carrots and Earthbound lettuce is certainly better than non-organic commercial produce.

But from a petroleum-consumption standpoint, the commercial organic and commercial non-organic products come out virtually even.  Pollard’s research led him to the conclusion (double-checked by economists from Berkeley) that at the end of the day, organic commercial produce utilizes about 4% less petroleum in its production than nonorganic commercial produce.  While the petroleum is saved in the course of pesticide choices, it is matched and even lost in the refrigeration, packing, and shipping processes.  That organic lettuce, without preservatives sprayed on it, is whisked into refrigerated processing buildings instantly upon picking, is packaged in plastic, and kept in refrigerated cars right up to your plate, all fueled with petroleum (and cooled with CFCs to boot). 

Fuel Savings Is Food Security

About one-fifth of the petroleum used in this country is used to ship food.  It takes about 57 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of California lettuce that winds up on a Vermont dinner plate. Fuel savings and food security go hand in hand – and national security, in the form of greater energy and food self-sufficiency, is one more benefit of buying local.

Fact is, we live in a place blessed with rich productive soil and talented people who have not forgotten the skill of gathering and coaxing food from the land around us.   Whether from your own garden, the farmers markets and farmstands, or food co-op , buy local, and stop wasting gasoline in the supermarket check-out line.