misterE0

People love to argue against beef. It's not really the problem. The problem is that instead of drinking the fresh water most of us have locally available, we bottle it up and ship it around the country. Most of us buy from giant grocery stores, who buy from distributors, who buy from wholesalers, who buy from farms. Our food system is built around convenience. Cows aren't killing the planet, people are. Our planet is an ecosystem, it will pretty much run itself if we would let it.

znomit

The already pathetic argument turns completely to crap once you put a wee bit of corn produced ethanol in the prius tank( a tankful will feed you for a year). Oh, and you can grow veges in the parking space for the car(so you don't need to drive to the supermarket to get them).

Actually had my first drive in a prius today. Sweet ride, but not green.

Roody

The lady's argument is pathetic, HOWEVER....

Food production is one of the biggest sources of pollution and carbon emissions on the planet. Bigger than transportation, in fact. Bigger than anything besides buildings, IIRC. That dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that's the size of California and Texas put together? It's caused mainly by fertilizer that runs off our farms, and into the Mississippi River.

I think that if you care about the environment, you should do what you can to minimize this. For example:

• Buy more organic food.
• Try to eat less meat, poultry and fish.
• Eat locally grown food when you can.

capolover

Honestly eating meat does more to ruin the planet and has a larger carbon foot print that driving a hummer.

Not that I don't eat meat.

NBSAR

A smug prius driver at 45 miles per gallon? A prius can do 50+ pretty easily.

Environmentalists don't drive!

Fribley

Her arguement is complete crap. She is comparing 1 calorie of food energy expended on the bike as a total cost of 10 "fossil fuel calories". And she compares 1 calorie of gas to 1 "calorie". So apparently according to her gas is the most enviroment friendly fuel there is but it only seems this way becuase she is comparing to different units. Actually screw this. I am not even going to argue this nonsense. So I will just leave it at this...

You have to eat to live, you dont have to buy gas to live.

oh yeah and the Prius is Fugly...

RT

I am a proud carnivore, but the processes and practices that get meat to your table is what leaves the footprint. I doubt Neanderthal Man left that big of a carbon footprint when they hunted and killed their game.

That being said with regard to carnivores and carbon footprints, Ted Nugent FTW

nick95673

A few holes in the argument. (screw it 1 point works for me)

1) Most Americans are fatter than the Henry the 8th the most gluttonous man in history. 99% of us do not eat to re-fill our tanks, we eat because we are bored, its tasty, or its time to eat. Most Americans can easily ride 20 miles a day without adding to their 3600 calorie a day average. *

*Food delivered to grocery stores is measured in pounds of food. This does not include alcoholic beverages though. Unfortunately, this does include food that is stolen or spoils and is thrown away either by the grocer or consumer. Measured this way, the average American "eats" about 3,600 calories per person per day and has not changed much from 1909 when it was 3,500 calories per person per day. These calories come from milk (14%), meat (28%), eggs and legumes (5%), grain products (26%), fruits and vegetables (14%) and fats, sweets and beverages (13%). https://www.dietitian.com/calories.html

ShadowGray

https://www.xkcd.com/437/

ivan_yulaev

I burn about 400 calories on my commute (15 miles). That's an extra thing of ramen, or about 20c.

So let's say the prius burns 1/4 gallon...gas is 4.50 in my area...that's 1.15. So a bicycle is about 6 times as efficient.

Fail.

goldfishin

they need to discover the wonder that is stubb's barbecue sauce. all points a moot in the face of it.... except for one. and that one is that eating is superior to pumping gas as the ingestion of the previously mentioned sauce will prove. put it on anything and everything. eat your neighbors dog if you want, because stubb's barbecue sauce will make anything taste like heaven.

twisteroo

Sometimes I will commute to work on my bike and get lazy for whatever reason, then beg a ride home from my wife in the Prius. If a Prius has my bike in the back and it carries two people who ate a full lunch that day, has a full tank of gas at $4.19 per gallon and the bike is my 520 with 110psi in the tires and we travel 5 miles at 50 mph against a 12 mph headwind and I worked 1/2 hour of overtime that day, what is the savings, really, what is it?

VinoHrdTailComm

Half The "Motorists" I See Are Unattractive, Overweight, and Lazy. Not Saying All or Even MOSt but I See Plenty of Them. How COuld This Womens Argument Be Taken Seriously. Even If I Do Eat 1k Calories More Which I Bet They Eat More Or Just as Much As Me, The Renewable Energy of Food Is Far Better Than Supporting Terrorist States And Abominations Like OPEC. Not To Mention What The Senior Member Pointed Out. She Is Overly Smug about Her Expensive Car Purchase. Cars Are made To need maintanence and MONEY MONEY and More MONEY goes Out Each year. Examples==> Emissions&Inspection, Oil Changes, Car Insurance, $4 Dollar Gas, Tires, Joints,Shocks,Registration,Licensing Renewal. And Many Are YEARLY/Monthly Costs. Your Health improves From Cycling, Your Wellbeing improves and most Importantly More Of Hard Earned Money Goes To YOU. Think Of How Mucvh in TOTAL COST it Costs U To Drive To Work. It Now Costs The "Average" 4 Cylinder Car About 72 cents a Mile Including Maintanence and Fuel Insurance Etc....

maddyfish

This is stupidity. Nearly everybody eats way too much anyway. I don't eat more when I am biking alot. I eat too much when biking, and too much when riding.

prawza

.. hence buying a prius is better off than riding a bike??!

IMO that is the stupidest comment i have ever seen. Her comment may be true, but just because we ride a bike doesn't mean we eat 1000x more than the average person, i probably eat an extra lunch bar or something.. WOW THIS FRUIT BAR WILL DESTROY THE EARTH

If that was her argument, we could argue back all day on how much fuel was consumed in the making of her car, tyres, leather seats, shoes, clothes etc.

the melting point of iron is ~1510ºC (2750ºF), and say her car weighs a ton. Without doing any calculations that's a lot of melting to do, and i don't know about you but getting anything up to those temperatures alone takes a crap load of energy. Now once this car is melted and manufactured, sayy from Tokyo, it has to be transported to wherever you are. BAM. More fossil fuels burned, more than the cost of transporting countless fruitbars for one person.

And since when has storage taken up fossil fuels??

go shove some more petrol up your nose.

/rant

(i realise most you guys have a car.. but yeah.. you get the drift )

Banzai

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.

thdave

I guess the Prius advocate is suggesting that excersize is wasteful, since it requires you to burn more calories?

What a crazy opinion.

crhilton

Here's my biggest problem with her argument: It assumes what kind of food you'll eat to make up for lost calories cycling. And it picks something really stupid: Meat.

Why would we be making up a majority of those calories with meat? Most of us should be looking for sources of carbohydrates: Grains, fruits, vegetables, sugars.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I find myself craving meat less as I cycle more. And I find myself craving carbohydrates, and battling with myself to avoid the simple ones so I'll actually have the energy to ride later.

She also just ignores an easy number: It's about 300 calories. The amount of calories the average American is consuming over what they should. I calculated it backwards from the rate of overweight and obese individuals a while back, so it's not a terribly accurate number but I think it should be within 100 calories.

She also used 30 miles. That's 10,950 miles. Anybody do 10,950 utility miles a year? I might do 3,000 (I know I do 2,000 for work), and I probably do another 2,000 for fun. So I'm looking at: 13.7 miles a day. That's about 600 calories (she vastly underestimated the calories needed to cycle, maybe she's a petite woman). That's about 300 more than I would eat anyway (I was overweight). And I'm not eating it in meat. I'm probably making up half of it in processed junk food, and half in the fruits and vegetables I actually eat now (I try to buy in season, except bananas; I love my bananas).

She also failed to account for how much her **** stinks. I call this the X factor, and it's an order of magnitude more effective than everything else; by definition. So this woman is clearly the most horrible human being in the universe because of the X factor.

mcsteve20

Holy crap...Priuschat.com...seriously?

Anyways, what about air pollution...something we don't product on our bikes. My Subaru creates less air pollution than her Prius...take that Toyota!

mcsteve20

I just want to say thank you to all of you who do not eat meat...now that I eat more meat, I don't have to feel bad about it.

huhenio

I eat more while commuting ... and it is delicious.

envane

you don't:

From One Bushel of Corn


1.6 Pounds of Corn Oil
Cooking Oil, Margarine, Mayonnaise, Salad Dressing, Shortening, Soups, Printing Ink, Soap, Leather Tanning
&
13.5 Pounds of 21% Protein
Gluten Feed Livestock Poultry Feed, Pet Food
&
2.6 Pounds of 60% Gluten Meal
Amino Acids, Fur Cleaner, Poultry Feed

AND

33 Pounds of Sweetener
Shoe Polish, Soft Drinks & Juices, Jams and Jellies, Canned Fruit, Cereal, Licorice, Peanut Butter, Pickles, Catsup, Marshmallows

capolover

This reminds me of that story about Hummers being better for the "overall" environment than a prius because the prius uses weird batteries.

Or that vegetarians kill more animals because they have to clear fields that kill bunnies to grow more plants.


Haha, utter nonsense from jealous people.

dynodonn 

Even if I break even between the cost of food versus gasoline, the food I eat, as extra energy so I can ride my bike, tastes much much better than gasoline.

mstrpete

Let's not forget the real problem with the Prius: you can't hear the freakin' things coming up behind you the way you can a real car. That's downright dangerous! Prius: the silent killer...is anyone blogging about that?

BTW, food tastes a lot better than gasoline or batteries.