Don't eat more oil than you need

It's easy to feel helpless while watching oil gush into the Gulf, spread to the wetlands, and ensnare wildlife. While most of us can't do anything about that disaster, we can make a difference by limiting the oil we use, starting with our food choices. Reduce demand for oil and watch the prices drop and the requests for drilling permits lose their urgency. We may even be able to take a step towards peace by reducing the incentive for war in oil-rich regions.

Eating the Cook for Good way helps reduce your oil consumption because you:

• Eat low on the food chain. The website PB&J Campaign describes why this works:
  

  Everything we eat comes from plants, whether we eat the plants directly or through an animal intermediary. The basic problem is that animals are inefficient at converting plants into meat, milk, and eggs. Relatively little of what they eat ends up in what you eat because animals use most of their food to keep them alive - to fuel their muscles so they can stand up and walk around, to keep their hearts beating, to keep their brains working.

• Choose local and seasonal.Cut the fuel used to ship and store your food. The National Center for Appropriate Technology says that about 5% of all the fossil fuel used in the U.S. goes to transporting, packaging, and processing food. That's the same amount used to grow the food and to store and prepare it at home.
• Eat pure, minimally processed food. Have a tomato instead of a can of V-8 or walnuts instead of potato chips. Eat beans that are recognizably beans instead of ones that have been spun into mock soy meat. Processing takes fuel, about 10 calories of fossil fuel for every one calorie of food energy, according to Richard Manning in The Oil We Eat: Following the Food Chain Back to Iraq. Even seemingly simple food, like breakfast cereal, takes 4 calories to process for every one calorie of food energy. Bonus: pure food tastes great and is better for you.
• Go organic. Avoid the fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides used in industrial agriculture. Richard Manning writes:

  On average, it takes 5.5 gallons of fossil energy to restore a year's worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land-in 1997 we burned through more than 400 years' worth of ancient fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace else.

Thrift can make all these choices automatic. Pesticides, processing, transportation, storage, and links in the food chain cost money to the producer, who passes the price on to the shopper (us!).

Making these choices as often as you can will not solve the oil crisis, but you can make a real difference. Enough people eating wisely may give society a chance to wise up.