Originally Posted by
envane
In industrialized farming, it takes gasoline to grow crops (tractors, pesticides). It also takes gasoline to transport it to the supermarket.
How much?
Corn in one of the most fuel intensive crops, and it takes 1/2 gallon per bushel to grow. A bushel of corn is around 56 pounds. So 1/2 a gallon of oil, plus some extra to get it to you.
You eat 56 pounds of corn a day?
Lady is full of ****.
You might. One McD's meal contains enough corn to fill the trunk of a car. It's just been fed to other things, or processed into the various chemicals/sweeteners/etc in your meal. It's a way to sell a system of obstensibly inelastic demand (your stomach) more corn than you would buy if it was just corn.
What you said about industrial agriculture is spot on...but it's a choice we've made as a society, to base our entire food chain off of corn, and to force corn yields on fossil fuels. If you make a choice to produce food like that, then the argument isn't very valid.
The argument also assumes that the Prius driver isn't eating.
The scary thing is what we've done to our food cycle. In the natural world, everyone is in a race to collect energy from the sun. We've broken that cycle, and our food is grown on fossil fuels...a finite resource. Our soil is basically dead, with little to no functioning bio-mass or polycultures remaining - it's simply a sponge for more oil based fertilizer. Without fossil fuels to make our crops grow now, 1 in 4 people is dead.
Think about that, and think about the willpower and work it's going to take to fundamentally transform our society. We are rotting from within.
In the US, we are corn's koala.