Energy Efficient Food

For a while, I’ve wondered why, when we talk about using too much fossil fuel, we don’t talk about the fuel used to produce food.  According to the Dish, Michael Pollan is trying to remedy that in a new book Cooked.  Here is the beginning of his Dish interview: 

The way we eat now is having a profound effect on climate change, which certainly threatens to bring about the end of the world as we’ve known it.  For better and worse, the industrial food system has made food very cheap. The poor can eat a better diet than they once could. It used to be that only the rich could eat meat every day of the week. Now just about everyone can, three meals a day. Fast-food chains make it easy. It’s not very good meat, and most of it is brutally produced, but it is within reach.

 But meat has a tremendous carbon footprint: beef in particular because it takes so much grain to get a pound of beef. It takes about 15 pounds of grain to get 1 one pound of beef, and that grain takes tremendous amounts of fossil fuel—in the form of fertilizer, pesticide, farm equipment, processing, and transportation. All told, it takes 55 calories of fossil-fuel energy to get one calorie of beef. The average for processed foods is 10 calories of fossil fuel per calorie of food.