I was cruising food blogs tonight for a client of mine and I stumbled upon an article over at the Cookthink Blog called NPR: Understanding the economics of French toast. Wow, this is very interesting, check this out — it really reminds you how profoundly bio fuels take food out of our mouths — in this case, by upping pricing on staple ingredients, just like Mark warned over on Biodiesel is Food Not Fuel by Mark Harrison:
On Sunday night, I caught a great story on the rising costs of food, all told through the lens of French toast.
For one baker in DC, 100 pounds of wheat flour has gone from $18.50 to $54.00, an 190% increase from this time last year. Eggs have gone from $1/pound to $1.50/pound. Just taking into account the increase for flour and eggs, one 600-pound batch of brioche dough costs the baker $162. This time last year, that batch was $55.
Factor in the rising demand for bio-fuels, the rising global demand for beef and the increase in fuel costs, and you have an environment where, as an economics professor from Duke says, the price of “everything has gone up.”
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
There is one distinction that needs to be made with regard to bio-fuels. Not all bio-fuels need to be, in fact they shouldn’t be, made from food crops such as corn. Rather we can make bio-fuels from switchgrass, jojoba and several other plants that are non-food stocks. We can also use all the waste oil (from chip factories, fast food joints etc) to make bio-fuel – this approach does nothing to the cost of the food.
Unfortunately in the USA the bio-fuel process is being dominated by the big farm lobby in its efforts to replace the farm subsidies that the WTO ruled against with “bio-fuel” subsidies. Once again we have been dominated by economic interests and not economic rationality.
Here’s the words of Mark from the other article:
“Soy and canola and oil palm are food, they are not fuel. Do you really want humans to be competing with cars for their food source?
A human consumes on average 20 liters of edible oil a year. 20 liters – around five and a quarter gallons. Per year. How long does it take your car to consume five gallons of fuel? Half a day?
Worldwide, we are consuming around 85 million barrels of petroleum every day – that’s 13.5 billion liters per day. The entire human population only eats around 328 million liters of food oil a day. So, let’s compare: 13,500 million liters of fuel oil consumed every day vs. 328 million liters of food oil consumed every day. That’s 41 times more fuel oil than food oil consumed.
What makes biodiesel proponents think that biodiesel is an alternative to petroleum? How could we possibly increase food oil production by 41 times? Cut down the rest of the mangrove swamps for oil palm plantations? Raze the rest of the rain forest for soy bean fields? Just to run the world on B10 (10% biodiesel, 90% petroleum diesel – hardly an end to petroleum dependency) we’d have to increase plant oil production by a factor of four. That alone would require destroying the rest of our suffering ecosystem, and that type of food oil consumption would likely raise food prices to the point where the majority of the world’s population living on just a few dollars a day would starve to death – the world’s poor simply can’t compete with our cars.
So, the world running on 10% biodiesel = ecological disaster and mass starvation. Not an optimal solution. We’re still dependent on petroleum, but manage to bury the ecosystem and starve billions of people.
No, biodiesel is not a solution. It’s something for a small group of hobbyists. It is something for politicians to make hay off of. It is something for fools and people who can’t do simple math to fall for.
What is the solution – solar? Wind? Nukes? I can’t say, but it is certainly not dreaming that we can farm our way out of this, and the solution is certainly not in wasting our time and resources pursuing this dead end.”