We don’t just drive or heat with fossil fuels—we are eating them.
Oil and gas prices are at record levels, and this is going to have a big impact on our diet in very short order because we don’t just drive or heat with fossil fuels—we are eating them.
Traditional US Homestead – Cover of 40 Homestead Projects book (Image: Amazon.com)
In Michael Pollan’s 2006 classic, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” he explained how if you eat a typical American diet, you are made of corn. It is in everything from animal feed to Cheez Whiz. A Mcdonald’s meal, writes Pollan, “might have looked like a hamburger, chicken nuggets, and a salad, but it was engineered overwhelmingly from corn…representing enough bushels to overflow the trunk.”
And if you carry it a step further, it means that you are made of fossil fuels. Pollan says corn is the SUV of plants, writing: “Growing it the way we do requires it to guzzle fuel in the form of fertilizer, about a quarter to a third of a gallon of petroleum for each bushel.”
In September 2021, we noted natural gas prices had soared to all-time highs and fertilizer plants were shutting down because of the cost of the feedstock. I wrote: “This will all get worse when the weather gets cold and the furnaces and boilers are turned on. Consultants are already predicting that we face the possibility of winter blackouts and the certainty of very high gas and electric bills.” And nobody had a war with Russia on their dance card.
Read more: Treehugger
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