The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

energy-intensive way to make food; for every calorie of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned.

“In an ecological system like this everything’s connected to everything else, so you can’t change one thing without changing ten other things.

since it contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than the meat of animals fed grass. A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.

Cooking, one of the omnivore’s cleverest tools, opened up whole new vistas of edibility. Indeed, in doing so it probably made us who we are. By making these foods more digestible, cooking plants and animal flesh vastly increased the amount of energy available to early humans, and some anthropologists believe this boon accounts for the dramatic incr

The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do). Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate.

imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.

supplanted a complete reliance on the sun for our calories with something new under the sun: a food chain that draws much of its energy from fossil fuels instead.

“This is the sort of farm machinery I like: never needs its oil changed, appreciates over time, and when you’re done with it you eat it.”

When you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it—or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of cor