UMich: How many Quads to make my food?

Disclaimer: I am not an expert on life cycle assessment or energy use in food production (yet!); this is just a way to dip my toe into obviously complicated issues that I find fascinating… Also all this discussion really is a really really long lead-in to talk about the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at University of Michigan, where I’ve been accepted! Hooray!

Numbers can lie, but sometimes they can be gosh-darn illuminating.

Here’s some data that hammers home the extent to which our food system here in the US has morphed into something that just plain doesn’t make sense.

It seems that we consume about 10.3 Quads of energy per year to produce, process, package, transport, sell, store and prepare our food. For all that, what do we get? 1.4 Quads of actual food energy.

Graphic from the University of Michigan that I also used in a presentation that I gave at the Fullerton Public Library back in October.

Interestingly, this 10.3 Quads used to produce our food is about 10% of the total energy consumed annually in the US. But what, you may ask, is a Quad? According to the illustrious Wikipedia, it’s:

• 8,007,000,000 Gallons (US) of gasoline or…  about 530 million 15-gallon fill-ups at the station?
• 293,071,000,000 Kilowatt-hours (kWh) or… powering 1 million 100 watt lightbulbs for 334 years

Yeah, I know that still doesn’t help much, sorry. I tried.

But really, the sheer amount is irrelevant. It’s the ratio that matters. This means that for every SEVEN units of fossil energy we’re putting in, we’re getting out only ONE unit of food energy. Huh?!

I’ve heard stats that “in the past” (e.g. pre-industrialized ag) one unit of fossil fuel energy would produce TWO units of food. Nothing at my fingertips to corroborate that, but it makes some sense if we can agree that food was grown with fewer industrial inputs (requiring fossil fuels), traveled shorter distances, was less processed, and used less packaging.

Some quick searching confirmed my expectation that organic production seems to require much less energy for many farm products than its conventional counterpart. This 22-year study by the Rodale Institute and partners showed that organic farming of corn and soybeans used an average of 30% less fossil energy, even when yield was accounted for (in fact, yield over the period of the experiment was the same for organic and conventional because soil fertility declined on the conventional plots).

But as we can see from the chart above, production is only about 20% of the story. After we’ve grown the food, we’ve still got to send it somewhere and wash it and pack it and maybe grind it up into something totally different and send it somewhere else and then cook it. It makes sense that organic production would use fewer fossil fuels when you consider that it restricts the use of pesticides and fertilizers, but in some cases, I’d imagine that when you look at the full product, some organic foods have a higher total energy cost than their conventionally available counterparts because they are transported further distances and in smaller (less efficient) batches.

This study by the UK’s Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food has a fascinating breakdown of energy use for organic versus conventional products per unit of output. The chart also breaks down the energy costs into categories: distribution, collection transport, fertilizers, etc. When all is taken into account, the organic crops they studied still used less energy for the most part, except for carrots.

However, the full report shows that the model they used assumes that produce is imported only as far away as Southern Europe and does not account for the large amount of imported organic produce from even further afield.

Isn’t the devil always in the details?

Anyway, it’s complex. It makes me wonder if we’ll ever get to the point where right under the nutrition facts, our labels will include a little line for joules of energy and kg of GhGs. Pepsico has really already gotten this started by labeling its Tropicana juices with the carbon footprint.

But seriously, will some text that tells me this orange juice costs 1.7 kg of carbon really ever mean anything to me? We talk about consumer literacy, but this is a case in which I tend to think that change needs to come at the system level, not at the level of individual consumers. It’s just too much to ask of a person to weigh all those choices: nutrition, price, environment, social… for every product, every time you’re purchasing food.

Fascinating stuff, and all things I could pursue if I decide to go the University of Michigan for their MS program in Sustainable Systems at the School of Natural Resources and the Environment. That graph up top came out of a study by Dr. Greg Keoleian who teaches in the program and is a guru of life cycle assessment, not only based on environmental indicators, but also incorporating social indicators for a variety of products. Plus, I could apply in my first year for the joint-MBA program in the Erb Institute to learn about how to bring these metrics into the business of food.

Pretty different from Community Development at Davis: more technical, more science-y, perhaps more of a birds’ eye view of sustainability (though there are also folks in the school who focus on Behavior, Education and Communication so I could bridge the two).

I like that I would learn tangible skills (life cycle assessment) in the U-Mich program but on the other hand, I know that I want to be a practitioner at the community level — in a small company or nonprofit — and not a researcher or a sustainability manager at Pepsico (at least I think) so it’s hard to say.

Other things influencing my thinking:

• plus: U-Mich has already committed to giving me some financial assistance,
• plus: I’ve never lived in the middle of the country and there’s so much interesting stuff going on in Michigan food-wise (especially Detroit!),
• huge, potentially deal-breaking MINUS: Boyfriend Jaime did not get in there.