{"id":3919,"date":"2014-04-16T16:41:18","date_gmt":"2014-04-16T15:41:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=3919"},"modified":"2014-04-16T16:41:18","modified_gmt":"2014-04-16T15:41:18","slug":"oil-and-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=3919","title":{"rendered":"oil and food"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DSC_1305_opt\"<\/a>When you sit down for your next meal try to imagine you are eating oil.\u00a0 Its a fairly disgusting thought, but that is literally what you are doing.\u00a0 We tend not to think about how much energy is used in growing, transporting and storing food.\u00a0 A helpful start is think about how much it takes grow a hectare of wheat.\u00a0 Data provided by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers suggests it takes on average 22566MJ of energy in total.\u00a0 Just 6MJ of this is due to human effort (presumably operating the tractor).\u00a0 To put it into perspective, for every calorie you eat, it takes an average of 8 calories of energy to get it into your mouth.\u00a0 Much more than that if its meat.<\/p>\n

There are two main reasons for this.\u00a0 When my grandparents were young, before the first world war, the great majority of the food they ate was local and seasonal.\u00a0 Nowadays the food we buy can come from anywhere any time.\u00a0 Seasonal, forget it.\u00a0 About the only thing I can think of that\u2019s still seasonal is sprouts!\u00a0 These very long supply lines often from different continents, rely on vast amounts of cheap energy and that\u2019s just for the transport.\u00a0 There is also another issue that has links to just before the first world war.\u00a0 Returning to our field of wheat, the fertilizer used to grow our wheat takes 10,651MJ\/Ha, almost half the energy required.\u00a0\u00a0 Fertilizers are not solely composed of nitrogen, but its the most important element within them.\u00a0 Why is this?<\/p>\n

Nitrogen is a vital component of amino-acids which form the building blocks of proteins, its also used to make the nucleotide bases used in DNA and RNA.\u00a0 There’s plenty of it around, the atmosphere is nearly 80% nitrogen.\u00a0 There\u2019s a problem though.\u00a0 Nitrogen does not like being alone.\u00a0 It bonds very happily with other atoms such as oxygen or hydrogen to form compounds, but not as happily as to itself.\u00a0\u00a0 Nitrogen in the atmosphere is a gas formed of two nitrogen atoms bound together by a very strong triple bond.\u00a0 Nitrogen gas is therefore very inert, stable and not bioavailable.\u00a0 This takes a lot of energy to break nitrogen the compound into individual nitrogen atoms, giving them a chance to combine with something else.\u00a0 In nature lightening can do it, the nitrogen combining with either one or two oxygen atoms.\u00a0 The resulting nitrogen oxides dissolve in rain water to form weak nitrous acids.\u00a0 These end up in the soil where plants can acquire the nitrogen.\u00a0 Another route for nitrogen to enter plants and the soil is via bacteria.\u00a0 Some bacteria can use enzymes to break the triple bond.\u00a0 Leguminous plants have evolved to be able use bacteria to “fix” nitrogen in forms they can utilise.\u00a0 You might ask why over millions of years all the nitrogen has not ended up in plants and the soil?\u00a0 The reason being other bacteria convert nitrates back to nitrogen gas.<\/p>\n

Till the 1840\u2019s crop rotation using legumes and rain were the main sources of nitrogen fertilizers for plants.\u00a0 Then mineral nitrates and guano (mineralised bird poo) came on the scene.\u00a0 These were finite.\u00a0 Just as it looked like there could be a food crisis in 1909 Haber and Bosch invented the Haber process.\u00a0 This as you will remember from school chemistry lessons uses lots of\u00a0 heat, pressure and an iron catalyst to break the triple bond combining hydrogen and nitrogen to make ammonia.\u00a0 Ammonia when combined with nitrates are forms of nitrogen that plants can easily assimilate.\u00a0 Crisis solved, loads of nitrogen and lots of food for everyone.\u00a0 There’s a problem however and its energy again.\u00a0 The Haber process is reliant on fossil fuels both for the hydrogen and the heat to drive the process.\u00a0 So much so that an astonishing 3-5% of the worlds natural gas alone is used to make fertilizer.<\/p>\n

Our current food system has given us much that is good, we have more food than ever before and more choice of what to eat.\u00a0 It also given us ecological damage and an obesity crisis.\u00a0 Our reliance on oil and gas make us vulnerable when they start to deplete.\u00a0 We are in the foothills of this now.\u00a0 Since 2000 the percentage income we spend on food has doubled.<\/p>\n

So what are we to do?\u00a0 GM crops obviously won\u2019t totally break the link with oil.\u00a0 The solutions lie in growing as much food as close to us as we can, organically.\u00a0 Even in the middle of cities.\u00a0 Also using a diversified agriculture with rotation using legumes, rather than monoculture.\u00a0 By eating less meat and less food in general.\u00a0 Can it be done?\u00a0 The experience of Cuba suggests its possible.\u00a0 After the break up of the USSR they lost their cheap oil and survived by doing the above.<\/p>\n

Neil<\/p>\n

This post is being entered for a science writing prize (very speculatively), more info on the link between oil and food can be found in our book<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When you sit down for your next meal try to imagine you are eating oil.\u00a0 Its a fairly disgusting thought, but that is literally what you are doing.\u00a0 We tend not to think about how much energy is used in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\noil and food<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When you sit down for your next meal try to imagine you are eating oil. 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