Give me this day my daily oil.
I believe very strongly that in the near future our carboholic addiction will lead to an immense catastrophe, both natural and economic. That’s why in everything I do I try to minimize my fossil fuel consumption; that’s why, rather than use my car, I bike to the village almost every day – almost 6 km away which also keeps me fit; that’s why I also have 10 solar panels, burn waste wood in my woodstove and live in a passive- solar house.
Nevertheless, in order to survive I need my daily oil. Yes, I am still an energy-hog. My musings on my most important morning meal will make that plain, preparation for which starts not at 6 a.m. but at 6 p.m. when I do the dishes for the day, not by machine but by rinsing, washing and drying them with my own hands. Part of my evening ritual is to clean our small slow cooker, fill it with one cup of organic oat flakes, add 3.5 cup of water and cover it with the lid. When I go to bed I plug it in, and in the morning the porridge is ready. I buy the oats in bulk – 10 kg – so the cost in money and environment is seemingly minimal, and, although it may appear that this is an excellent example of energy-efficiency, a closer look reveals that I am an energy-sinner, because there is more to breaking my fast than preparing the porridge. Consider the following.
My morning tea, for instance, is a real global mix. While boiling a full kettle of water, I dice a small piece of ginger root- of Chinese origin – and put this in a perforated container which comes with the large teapot, together with a bag of ginseng tea – from Korea – some peppermint – home-grown – some loose Rooibos tea from South Africa and loose green tea also all the way from the Far East. Over all this I pour the boiling water. This curious concoction gives me seven cups of tea of which I drink five in the morning (good for my kidneys since I have had stones there twice, thanks to my running) and my wife a more modest two.
So you see, my tea has traveled the seven seas before it arrives in Tweed, Ontario, and my fascination with far-fetched food doesn’t stop there.
While my brew is steeping, I add some tasty morsels and some neutral items to my fast-breaking food. First the tasteless stuff – one table spoon of soy-derived lecithin – perhaps all the way from Brazil – and two spoons of ground-up frozen flax seeds. At least that is of Canadian origin, likely from the prairies, 2000 km away. The more appetizing additions are frozen blueberries from Nova Scotia and fruit in season such as peaches from Niagara, apple or raspberries from our garden or a mandarin from the Middle East. Oh, yes, I make my own maple syrup, and always add a dash of that as well.
That’s my breakfast. And, in spite of all my efforts, it still requires a lot of polluting substances. A closer look at my plate reveals not only lots of body fuel, but also the equivalent of one liter of pure Alberta Crude tar-sand oil.
How do I arrive at that figure? Here’s my rough calculation: some 20 percent of my breakfast fuel is used in these teas and fruits, grown in fields many a thousand kilometers away, where tractors and natural gas-based fertilizers and petroleum-derived pesticides are used. Everything comes by container ships, emitters of lots of CO2. A further 50 percent is burned in processing, packaging and transporting them from their home-base to the store by boat or train or truck and car when we bring it home. The oats is at least Canadian, but it still goes through several steps before it is ready for my plate: after the land is plowed, disked, seeded, fertilized and the crop is harvested, it is trucked to a mill to be cleaned, steamed, hulled, cut and rolled to turn it into edible flakes, all at significant energy costs. It then needs packaging, more trucking and storing: another 30 percent of fuel.
Still that is a lot better than eating dry cereals, such as corn flakes. There the grinding, milling, wetting, drying, baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories for every calorie of food energy it produces. Throw in the packaging and the transportation, the heating or cooling in the store, the cost to get it to me, the consumer, and twenty calories of fossil-fuel energy is not an exaggerated figure.
Meat is worse. In an article in Harper’s, February 2004, entitled, “The Oil We Eat,” I read that “it takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make one calorie of (feeding lot) beef.” The methane generated from these feed lots contributes greatly to the Green House Gases we produce in North America. In this late hour of civilization, it may well be the Christian thing to have a vegetarian diet.
So how about the rest of the day? My daily two cups of shade-grown organic coffee is not an innocent consumption either. To process just one pound of coffee takes 8,000 calories of fossil fuel energy. I have been told that this equals one liter of crude oil, 30 cubic feet of natural gas,, and around two and a half pound of coal.
We eat at night a light snack, with a more full meal at noon, consisting of a salad three times a week, which, in the summer, is fully obtained from our garden, together with carrots, a leaf of kale, some parsley, a few slices of red beets, onion of course, some garlic also as well as plenty of cherry tomatoes, all seasoned with lemon juice, olive oil and flaxseed oil, three items originating from far away. On Sundays we have a plate of soup, while during the week our other meals are potatoes or some pasta with vegetables or sauce. Our large garden provides us with potatoes, beans, cabbages, sprouts, squash – you name it. The only meat we use is the occasional all-beef sausage when we have ‘Boerekool.”
If I were to be perfectly honest to God, I should change the line in the Lord’s Prayer from “Give Us this Day our Daily Bread”, to “Give us this Day our Daily Oil”, as we can’t get the one without the other. Slowly our world is starting to realize that oil use constitutes a sin against creation, reason why the line “Forgive us our trespasses” is something we have to pray continuously.
This article can be seen at: https://www.hielema.ca//. He can be reached at ‘hielema@allstream.net