Odsox wrote:Now here's another thing.
As I grow all our vegetables like many others on this group, I have a largish freezer to smooth out the glut/famine ratio (just invented that term)
Also I make all our bread and jam, and nearly all meals are cooked from scratch ... no fast food ready meals here.
So my comment is, as I do all of that, our house energy usage is somewhat higher than average.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing ?
I'm sure making my own bread is less energy efficient than buying it ready made. A loaf of industrial bread must use less energy when baked hundreds at a time versus my three loaves at a time.
The flour still has to be fetched from the shop, so not really any saving there either.
The same goes for the few pots of jam that I make.
So, unless you have your own wind generator, hydro or PV, wouldn't it be more energy "efficient" to eat out every day at McThingies ?
Possibly, but it wouldn't be half as much fun.
It's worth bearing in mind that carbon footprint calculators (at least any that I'm aware of!) don't take into account the carbon emitted on your behalf by industry and manufacturing, the embedded energy in most of what you buy or eat, so for the average person the figure they give is probably about half of the actual carbon dioxide that is emitted on their behalf. They aren't without value, but they're quite a crude way of measuring things and don't necessarily give you the whole picture. For instance, a lot of them are heavily biased towards vegetarianism or veganism as being the most environmentally-friendly choice of diet, and there's no doubt that eating a lot of intensively-farmed meat is very bad for the environment, but you're not going to convince me that eating imported soya grown on what used to be the Brazilian rainforest is better for the environment than eating, say, beef from local, grass-fed cattle. It's useful for getting you to think about your diet (or, more broadly, your lifestyle) but after the initial 'woah!' moment, each individual choice has so many different implications that you just have to trust your common sense that you're doing the right thing for your situation.
So if you have another freezer to store all your veg, the carbon footprint calculator will calculate the energy it uses but not the carbon dioxide sequestered by the fruit trees in your garden; or if you make your own bread, it'll take into account the energy used by your oven, whereas someone who only heated up a ready meal or got a take-away and recycled the carton every evening would have a very low energy use, and the calculator wouldn't show them the energy used by the nitrogen fertiliser to grow the corn to feed the chicken, the refridgerated lorries, the electricity used by the processing plants and factories and supermarkets...
I've heard it said that 'efficient' industrial methods of growing and processing food emit less CO2 than doing it yourself, but I am highly skeptical, and I feel that even if the CO2 emissions are technically lower there are still a load of other issues around sustainability, soil quality, biodiversity, community, food security, peak oil etc that lead me to favour small-scale methods. If I were you, I'd just hold on to the fact that your carbon footprint is a
more realistic reflection of your total energy use than it would be for someone whose environmental impact is hidden inside industrial manufacturing and not worry about it too much, and that someone who nurtures plants and is aware of the changing seasons and the ecosystem around them will probably make the right environmental choices anyway.
