Getting Fossil Fuels Off The Plate Analysis

My second critical response essay is on the reading Getting Fossil Fuels Off the Plate by Michael Bomford. This reading is about how food is grown, processed, and transported around the world and how much energy it takes to get food from its origin to your plate. Our aptitude to obtain food with ease is our most treasured resource, but regrettably our present structures of food production, especially agriculture, are causative to the failing strength of the world’s air and water, while concurrently subject to climate change. It is near impossible and time consuming on a decade scale to repair our past century’s damages to the Earth’s lands, oceans, and skies. We also can’t fix our problems of energy conservation without improving our production …show more content…
Then you use another oil-powered machine to drive it to a place where it’s processed, a place that uses electricity which comes from coal or natural gas. After the crop is processed, it’s then wrapped up it up in plastic, which is oil, and put into an oil-powered vehicle to transport it however many miles to a food distribution warehouse that uses electricity from coal or natural gas, and an oil-powered vehicle then drives it however many more miles to the supermarket and you drive your oil-powered vehicle however many miles to the market and take it home. You likely eat some of the food, throw the rest away, and then an oil-powered vehicle takes the waste you left and drives it however many miles to the dump. The way food is grown, produced, and transported around the world today is an enormous waste of hydrocarbon energy. "Each calorie of energy I get from food required seven to ten calories from fossil fuels to get to my plate" (Bomford, pg. 120). There are actually that many calories of energy in every calorie of food eaten in the …show more content…
With a constantly growing population, and fossil fuels depleting, food will become scarce unless we start the overhaul of renewable energy resources immediately. Obviously, food is the most significant factor in everything that could possibly collapse in the near future with approximately 30 years left of oil, that and medicine. The present production system of food is unsustainable. It is too reliant on fossil fuels. This will threaten global food supply because with the present way food is grown and processed, fossil fuel stock deficiencies mean the same fate for food and pretty much everything else humans need. The present food production system should be changed into an efficiently sound system that uses renewable resources in local neighborhoods. We must throw out the fossil fuel- based food production system we have now and create an effective and maintainable one for the