Oil & food, or where does your fresh fruit come from?

I haven't been posting much as we're in the middle of a series of medical tests. That limbo state where nothing definite is known yet but there's lots of bad possibilities is unsettling. However, as I start shopping for summer produce at the farmer's market, this came through my email today, and I thought I'd share.

Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to save Civilization is by Lester R Brown, and has lots of good thoughts about sustainability. Today's excerpt, read the full thing here, is about oil use in food production, from tractors & fertilizer to processing such as canning, freezing or dehydrating. I'll just add there's a link at the end to the next chapter about urban farming, a subject I'm very interested in. Shortcut to it here.

Here's a teaser quote that I hope will encourage others to buy things with less packaging:

The 14 percent of energy used in the food system to move goods from farmer to consumer is equal to two thirds of the energy used to produce the food. And an estimated 16 percent of food system energy use is devoted to canning, freezing, and drying food—everything from frozen orange juice concentrate to canned peas.

Food staples such as wheat have traditionally moved over long distances by ship, traveling from the United States to Europe, for example. What is new is the shipment of fresh fruits and vegetables over vast distances by air. Few economic activities are more energy-intensive.

Food miles—the distance that food travels from producer to consumer—have risen with cheap oil. At my local supermarket in downtown Washington, D.C., the fresh grapes in winter typically come by plane from Chile, traveling almost 5,000 miles. One of the most routine long-distance movements of fresh produce is from California to the heavily populated U.S. East Coast. Most of this produce moves by refrigerated trucks. In assessing the future of long-distance produce transport, one writer observed that the days of the 3,000-mile Caesar salad may be numbered.

Packaging is also surprisingly energy-intensive, accounting for 7 percent of food system energy use. It is not uncommon for the energy invested in packaging to exceed that in the food it contains. Packaging and marketing also can account for much of the cost of processed foods. The U.S. farmer gets about 20 percent of the consumer food dollar, and for some products, the figure is much lower. As one analyst has observed, “An empty cereal box delivered to the grocery store would cost about the same as a full one.”