The oil in your oatmeal - A lot of fossil fuel goes into producing, packaging and shipping our breakfast.

Taken from an article by Chad Heeter in the San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday 26 March  2006.

Please join me for breakfast.  It's time to fuel up again.

On the table in my small apartment this morning is a healthy-looking little meal - a bowl of oatmeal topped with frozen raspberries, and a cup of imported coffee.  Like most of us, I prepare my breakfast at home, and the ingredients for this one probably cost me about US$1.25.

My breakfast fuels me up, and it satisfies me.  But before I put spoon to cereal, what if I consider this bowl of oatmeal porridge from a different perspective?  Say a Saudi Arabian one.

Then what you'd likely to see - what's really there, just hidden from our view (not to say our taste buds) - is about four ounces of crude oil. Throw in those luscious red raspberries and that cup of java (an additional three ounces of crude), and you've got a tiny bit of the Middle East right here in my kitchen.

Now, let's drill a little deeper into this breakfast.  Just where does this tiny gusher of oil actually come from?  (We'll let this oil represent all fossil fuels in my breakfast, including natural gas and coal.)

Nearly 20% of this oil went into growing my raspberries, oats and coffee - think tractors as well as petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides.

The next 40% of my breakfast fossil-fuel equation is burned up between the fields and the grocery store in processing, packaging and shipping.

Take that box of oatmeal - each step of cleaning, steaming, hulling, cutting and rolling that turns the raw oats into edible flakes.  Those five essential steps require significant energy.  Next, my oat flakes go into a plastic bag (made from oil), which in turn is inserted into an energy-intensive, pressed wood-pulp, printed paper box.  Only then does my breakfast leave the factory and travel thousands of fuel-gorging, carbon-dioxide-emitting miles to my grocery.  Coming from another continent, my coffee takes an even longer fossil-fuelled journey to my neighbourhood.

The final 40% of the fossil fuel in my breakfast is used up by the simple acts of keeping food fresh and then preparing it in home kitchens and restaurants, chilling in refrigerators and cooking on stoves using electricity or natural gas.

For decades, scientists have calculated how much fossil fuel goes into our food by measuring the amount of energy consumed in growing, packing, shipping, consuming and finally disposing of it.  The caloric input of fossil fuel is then compared with the energy available in the edible product, the caloric output.

What they've discovered is astonishing. According to researchers at the University of Michigan's Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, an average of more than 7 calories of fossil fuel is burned up for every calorie of energy we get from our food. This means that in eating my 400 calorie breakfast, I will, in effect, have consumed 2800 calories of fossil fuel energy (some researchers claim the ratio is as high as 10 to 1).

So how do you gauge how much oil went into your food?

First, check how far it travelled. The further it went, the more oil it required. Next, gauge how much processing went into the food. A fresh apple is not processed, but apple cereal or muesli bars require enormous amounts of energy to process. The more processed the food, the more oil it requires.  Then consider how much packaging is wrapped around your food.  Buy fresh vegetables instead of canned, and buy bulk beans, grains and flour if you want to reduce that packaging.

But if there was truth in packaging, where my oatmeal box now tells me how many calories I get from each serving, it would also tell me how many calories of fossil fuels went into the product.

On a scale from one to five - with one being non-processed, locally grown products and five being processed, packaged imports - we could quickly average the numbers in our shopping trolley to get a sense of the ecological footprint of our diet.

What appeared to be my simple, healthy meal of oatmeal, berries and coffee looks different now. From the perspective of fossil-fuel consumption, I now look at my breakfast as a waste of precious resources. What I eat for breakfast connects me to the planet, deep into its past with the fossilised remains of plants and animals which are now fuel, and into the future, when these non-renewable resources will probably be in scant supply.

Maybe these thoughts are too grand to be having over breakfast, but I'm not the only one on the planet eating this morning. My meal travelled thousands of miles to reach my plate.

Then there's the rise of perhaps 600 million middle-class Indians and Chinese, already demanding the convenience of packaged meals and foreign flavours. What happens when middle-class families in India or China decide they want imported oats and raspberries for breakfast? They'll dip more and more into the planet's communal oil well. And someday soon, we'll all suck it dry.