gas guzzling food or local food?

It takes about 10 fossil fuel calories to produce each food calorie in the average American diet. So if your daily food intake is 2,000 calories, then it took 10,000 calories to grow that food and get it to you. In more familiar units, this means that growing, porcessing and delivering the food consumed by a family of four each year requires the equivalent of almost 34,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy, or more than 930 gallons of gasocline (for comparison, the average U.S. household annually consumes about 10,800 kWh of electricity, or about 1,070 gallons of gasoline). In other words, we use about as much energy to grow and transport our food as to power our homes or fuel our cars."

The moral of the story: buy locally grown foods.

More on this from the Organic Consumers Assocation!

You can also download my article called Energy, Food and You: On the Path to Reconciliation at http://www.pcusa.org/hunger/downloads/ff_energy.pdf