Dan Barber - my own personal food hero, and one of the featured presenters at Hazon’s 2007 Food Conference - was recently interviewed over at Salon.com.   The topic: agriculture, oil, and the 2007 Farm Bill.  Barber said:

In this country alone, food – from growing to processing, transportation and fertilizer — accounts for about 17 percent of all oil we use, a little less than automobiles. Not only is there an ecological cost to transporting food, because of fossil fuels, but there is a huge ecological impact from the way we grow our food – whether it travels 10 feet or 10,000 miles.  

And…

The typical American cow is just an oil barrel. It’s [fed] corn. And that corn is fed fertilizer and pesticides, meaning oil. It is trucked from a cornfield in Iowa to a feedlot in Colorado, or wherever, again oil. And then that hamburger meat is processed … in oil. And then that hamburger meat is shipped to all the fast-food restaurants — more oil. [The process is] a gas guzzler.

I’m not clear from the last quotation if Barber purposefully conflates conflating cooking oils with petroleum.  Regardless, it’s a fascinating comparison because it reveals our love/hate relationship with oil. 

Of course, it’s not a perfect comparison because cooking oils are renewable, while petroleum is not (at least not on any helpful time scale).  Still, we turn up our noses at excess food miles and the “bad oil” baggage that comes with them, while going to great lengths to procure ”good oil” like a high-quality extra virgin olive oil that gives our pasta more flavor and our latkes a delicate crunch.  Many localvore enthusiasts actually point to olive oil as one of the non-local items they can’t do without, and continue to ship it in from Italy, Israel, Greece….  So whether he meant to or not, Barber’s statement reveals how truly dependent we are on oil for food – whether from the tractors that plow the field, or the olive oil drizzled over our salad. 

Read the full interview here.