What's the mileage on that bicycle?

"Huh! what's that again?"
"You heard that right. Do you know the mileage on that bicycle?"

The logic goes thus. Everything we eat is produced somewhere, processed somewhere and transported to our supermarket and from there to our homes. It takes energy to do that. A major contribution of the energy needed to produce, process and transport our food comes from fossil fuels (the stuff USA is officially addicted to, since January'06). When you eat that sandwich, you are effectively gulping down gasoline. Every time you ride that bicycle, you are burning some of the same energy which came from the fossil-fuels. Naturally this bears the question, "How many miles can you go on that bicycle for every gallon of gasoline you consume (indirectly... through the food you eat)?". Got it? Good!

Lets go over the answer step by step:
1> How much energy does a gallon of gasoline have?
This is called the calorific value of the fuel. This EPA webpage says that the energy content of gasoline is an average 113,000 BTU/gallon. That translates to 28,476 kcal/gallon. (1 BTU = 0.252 kcal)

2>How many gallons of gasoline do you (indirectly) consume?
This depends on the type of your diet. The table below shows the amount of fossil fuel input for different types of diet. These numbers are from the book, "Food energy and society", by David and Marcia Pimentel [1]. Note that all these numbers are for a 3600 kcal daily diet (remember 1 food Cal. = 1 kcal). It is interesting to note here that average American eats ~1500 Cal. more than the daily requirement of 2100 Cal. I have converted the fossil fuel input number into gallons of fuel using the calorific value given above.

3> How many food Calories do we burn while bicycling?
My search yielded a number of different values. I found this table on howstuffworks.com and a few other websites [this pdf, page 21]. It says that 0.049 Calories are burnt per pound, per minute while cycling at the speed of 15 mph. Another table is given in the Dietary guidelines for America, and can be found on many websites [CDC webpage, also this pdf - page 4]. This says that a person weighing 154 lb, will burn 290 Cal. when bicycling at a speed less than 10 mph, for one hour. Translates to 0.031 Cal. per lb per minute. A person weighing 154 lb, bicycling at 10 mph will have to go 125.7 mile to burn 36oo Cal. daily intake.

Diet	Fossil fuel input(kcal)[1]	Fossil fuel input(gallon)	Miles to burn 3600 Cal.	Mileage (MPG)
Vegetarian (0%)	18,275	0.64	125.7	196
Lacto-Ovo (14%)	25,230	0.89	125.7	142
Average US (28%)	34,560	1.21	125.7	104

There goes the answer to the question. Bicycling is fun, it is a good exercise and nothing beats the mileage on that bicycle.

Reference:
[1] Pimentel D, Pimentel M. "Food, energy and society". Colorado University Press, 1996.

Technorati Tags: bicycling, food, fossil fuels, diet, vegetarianism

Related posts: Vegetarianism, Greens Eat Greens

Greens Eat Greens

This is a continuation of my previous post about Vegetarianism. In that post, I pointed out that one of the reasons for joining the "veggie" band was - "because it is good for the environment". In other words, "eating greens is important if you truly wish to become Green". In this post, I try to explore this issue of vegetarianism and environment.

In today's globalized world, the food we consume is not necessarily produced in our backyard or even in our country. That bottle of water you may have on your table or that sandwich you just ate for lunch or dinner contained ingredients which probably came from all over the world. Energy is expended at each and every stage in the food production~packaging~delivery chain. Let us have a comparative look at the important steps in this chain for vegetables and for meat (e.g. beef).

Vegetables/Grains:	Meat:
Growing and harvesting (Fertilizers, Pesticides, Seeds, Farm implements etc.) Packaging (material, process) Transportation and storage (refrigeration, fuel for transport etc.) Processing (most grains are processed into some other product before consumption)	Growing and harvesting feed stock for animals (Fertilizers, Pesticides, Seeds, Farm implements etc.) Transportation of feedstock Energy input to the animal farm facility (includes stuff like growth hormones or other drugs given to the animals) Transportation of animals to meat processing facility Meat production Packaging Transportation to final consumer.

It is clear that meat production involves more number of steps than vegetable production. The energy input in most of the cases is in the form of fossil fuels. Most of the fertilizers, chemical pesticides used have significant fossil fuel input in it. Transportation and farm machinery etc. requires fuel. The packaging (e.g. plastic boxes, wrapping etc.) requires fossil fuel inputs. Every morsel of food we consume provides us with energy, which is commonly measured in Calories. 1 food Calorie = 1000 thermodynamic calories or 1 kcal (I can't believe I was unaware of this fact so far!). The energy contained in fossil fuels is also given in terms of "calories/kg" or the calorific value of the fuel. So a simple measure of the energy efficiency of our diet is:

The ratio of calories of energy that we get from the diet to the calories of (largely fossil fuel) energy that go into producing that diet and bringing it to our homes.
Therefore,
% efficiency = 100 x (kcal energy output from food) /(kcal energy input into food)

Now, I am not the first one to come up with this concept. Energy sources are valuable and there have been a lot of studies done to understand how much energy we consume and the way we consume it. David and Marcia Pimentel from Cornell University have done extensive research in this area. Their book, Food Energy and Society [1] contains a lot of data regarding the energy input for various kinds of food production systems. They have calculated the amount of fossil fuel energy (measured in kcal) input in the food production system per kcal of food protein produced, for different food groups (meats, legumes, vegetables etc.). Note that the energy output is only for the protein content of the food a not total energy content. Most meats have large protein content while most grains and vegetables don't. I am tabulating some of the data which is relevant to our purpose here {from [1], chapters 8, 9, 10 and 11}:

Food Products	% energy efficiency
Animal Products
Chicken	6.3%
Milk	5.3%
Eggs	3.6%
Beef	2.9%
Range Beef	10%
Pork	1.5%
Lamb	0.5%
Range Lamb	6.3%
Tuna	5%
Shrimp	0.7%
Vegetables/Grains
Corn	250%
Wheat	220%
Oats	510%
Rice	210%
Apples	110%
Oranges	170%
Potatoes	123%
Spinach	23%
Tomatoes	60%

The numbers speak for themselves. It is clear that producing meat and animal products is a highly inefficient operation (in terms of energy efficiency as defined above). It is not simply about fossil fuel consumption. Producing meat/animal products consumes a large amount of land and water as well. But that is a totally different topic of discussion. For some interesting information on that I refer you this study [2]. David and Marcia Pimentel also compare various types of diets in their book. Data collected by them shows {from [1], page 147} that a non-vegetarian diet requires twice as much fossil fuel energy input as compared to a vegetarian diet. Lacto-ovo diet falls somewhere in between these two.

Another interesting study I found online while searching for references is a yet to be published paper [3] by Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin of The University of Chicago. They have used the energy input data given in [1] to compare the total green house gas (GHG) burden of many different diets (red-meat based, average American diet, lacto-ovo, vegan) with varying percentage of animal products. Without going into details, here are some interesting results one can find in this study {from[3], Figure 3}:

• The difference between GHG burden of average US diet (27% Animal products) and a totally vegan diet is ~1.5 ton per person per year. Compare this to the difference in GHG burden of Toyoto Camry and Toyota Prius which is ~1.05 ton per person per year.
• Switching from a red meat based diet (27% animal products) to a lacto-ovo diet (27% animal products) is equivalent to switching from a Toyota Camry to a Prius in terms of the GHG burden.

Anyway, there are many interesting articles, studies, books out there which more or less agree that a plant based diet is more efficient and sustainable than a meat based diet. If you are seriously thinking about switching from that SUV to an energy efficient car, why not think about switching to a plant based diet? At the very least, you can think about cutting down the proportion of meat you consume. If you are a true Green, think about eating green too.

Given below are the references mentioned above and links to other articles I came across while researching for this post. One of the links given have many good tips if you want to switch to a veggie diet. In my next post I want to answer the question - "how many miles per gallon does my bicycle give?". I think I have enough data gathered to do the calculation, so stay tuned.

Update (03/20/2006): What's the mileage on that bicycle?

References:
[1] Pimentel D., and M. Pimentel (Editors), 1996. Food, Energy and Society, University Press of Colorado, 363p. ISBN: 0870813862 [link]

[2] Pimentel D., and M. Pimentel, 2003: Sustainability of meat-based and plant-based diets and the environment. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 78(3), 660S-663S. [subscription reqd.]

[3] Eshel, G. and P. A. Martin, 2006: Diet, Energy and Global Warming. In press, Earth Interactions. [pdf link thanks to Judith's blog]

Links:
[::] Eating Fossil Fuels by Dale Allen Pfeiffer [pdf link]

[::] Why Our Food is so Dependent on Oil by Norman Church

[::] The Ethics of Eating Meat by Charles Eisenstein. (Makes a case for farm raised animals and ethical meat eating)

[::] Fossil Fuels and Energy Use @ The Sustainable Table (Has many useful tips to have a more sustainable kitchen for both vegetarians and meat eaters).

[::] Veg How To? @ VegForLife (tips for converting to the veggie creed)

[::] Meat Production's Environmental Toll by Stephen Leckie @ Toronto Vegetarian Association

Technorati Tags: Vegetarianism, Environment, Food production, Energy efficiency, Fossil fuels

Vegetarianism...

There was a post on Sepia Mutiny blog a few days ago about being vegetarian in the USA and related stuff. The post and the many different comments to it, got me thinking about the issue. I was a "non-vegetarian" till February of last year and changed my preferences since then, thanks to a video made by PETA showing the gruesome treatment of animals on the factory farms here in USA. After that friends asked me a lot of questions and there was a lot of skepticism and some appreciation too. I guess the typical questions were:

Q> So no meat huh? It is simply not possible to live without meat in the US man! In India it is fine but not here.
A> I don't think so. It has been really fine till now.

Q> How can you eat only ghaas-phuus (a Hindi term for leaves and grass)?
A> Well given the fact that I ate primarily that for the first 22 years of my life, (till then I was in India and very rarely ate chicken or mutton prepared the Indian way... tandoori etc.) I guess I will be fine. To one guy who expressed total disgust at a delicious dish I was eating, I have said, "well ghaas-phuus is better than rotting carcasses". But that was just mean.

Q> PETA video huh! What rubbish! It's all part of nature man! Big fish eat small fish... Tiger eats the cow... Your vegetables were also alive you know!
A> I know! I never said that I am against eating "non-living" beings. I only stated where I wanted to draw my line (Eating vegetables only. Oh! And also milk and eggs once in a while). I know some Indian friends who eat all other meat (Chicken, duck, fish etc.) but don't eat beef or pork. They are drawing their own line where to stop and I am drawing mine.

As the one of the comments to the SM post pointed out, there are primarily four reasons people are/become vegetarians:

1. Religious precepts - as with jains, amritdhaari sikhs, jews, muslims, vaishnavs etc.
2. Incompatibility with dietary requirements - allergies, performance maximization, weight management
3. Anti-vivisection principles (I take this to mean that someone is against slaughtering of animals but not due to his/her religion)
   
4. Psychosomatic aversion - general nausea associated with odor, texture etc

BTW, there is a lot of gradation between "Vegans" and "Non-vegetarians". You can check it out here. I guess I am a "lacto-ovo vegetarian". My reasons fall somewhere in between #1 and #3. In my family my mother and sister have always been vegetarians. My father tried all kinds of meat in his youth and later stopped eating meat. My wife has always been a strong vegetarian. In her case probably all of the four reasons above apply. My family neither encouraged me to eat meat nor did they oppose me when I did.

Reasons #2 and #4 don't apply either. The reason I stopped eating meat was I could not stand the way in which animals were treated before/during the slaughter. So that would strictly fall under #3. Someone pointed out to me that there are alternatives to that and I could eat ethically raised and slaughtered animals instead (like free-range chicken, pasture grazed cows etc.). In principle, yes! But I don't want to do that because it is hard to verify that everywhere I eat (I don't cook meat at home) and it is much simple not to eat meat at all.

Recently I have been reading a lot about Buddhism and practicing meditation with Happy Valley Sangha, thus becoming a culturally Hindu, practicing Buddhist and religiously confused person. That has added a "religious" angle to my being vegetarian as well. People often ask me if Hindus/Buddhists are strict vegetarians. The answer is No! Non-violence is one of the precepts to be followed by practicing Buddhist as well as practicing Yogis (those who follow Patanjali's system of yoga). Thich Nhat Hanh has explained this precept very well in one of his talks. I am paraphrasing it here.

Suppose you are lost in a forest and you want to go north to reach certain destination, you should follow the north star. This does not however mean that you expect to reach the north star. You expect to reach north, following the north star is only a tool or guidance to go north. Practicing non-violence is like that. You want to make sure that you are causing the least amount of harm to living beings. That does not however mean that you will be able to cause "no harm at all". Non-violence helps you to achieve your spiritual goal. The greater your diligence in practicing it, the greater will be the reward. The greater your diligence in following the north star, the earlier you will reach your destination.

There is another argument that I heard very recently about Vegetarianism. I attended a lecture about the ecological footprint and the speaker argued that one way of reducing your ecological footprint is to reduce meat consumption or become vegetarian. The reason is, the amount of energy that goes in to produce meat (and store, transport it etc.) is many time more than the amount of energy one get out of it. For vegetables and grains the ratio is smaller and in some cases less than 1. I am looking for this data and if it is really true, it would add another dimension to my being a vegetarian. My research into this will also be a new post soon.

I was a bit hesitant about writing this post. I don't like "evangelizing" about Vegetarianism. It sometimes evokes a very strong reaction among people. I personally wouldn't want to be told what to eat and what not to either. But there are some people who get offended even when I am not evangelizing about it; e.g. when I ask the waiter about the vegetarian choices they have, others at the table get annoyed. It's as if I am doing a horrible crime by asking about it. Among Indians (especially some FOBs) there is something about eating meat and being cool. I have seen reactions which amounted to: "vegetarian huh! What a sissy!". (BTW, I have observed a similar sentiment about booze). I have learned to ignore such reactions.

Ultimately, how much your choices matter to you depends on what purpose they serve and how strong your commitment to the purpose is. I really admire Americans and Europeans who have been raised in a non-vegetarian culture but have become vegetarian for a principle. Their belief in the principle (be it ethical/environmental or some other) is strong enough to influence their choices. But I have no beef (or chapatti) with those to whom it's simply a choice and doesn't serve any other purpose than filling the tummy. I have had a chance to "taste" both sides and I have to say that both are equally yummy. Since now though, I am sticking with the veggies.

Update (03/10/06): My follow-up post about vegetarianism and its impact on environment is here.

Technorati Tags: Vegetarianism, Vegetarian, Buddhism, Hinduism, PETA