Here’s a thought-provoking, if not entirely appetizing, snack recipe: Slice a large tomato and drizzle five or six tablespoons of your favorite cooking oil on top. Depending on where you bought your tomato, that oil is about the amount of diesel fuel needed to grow it and deliver it to your plate. Enjoy your food!
The influential environmental scientist and energy historian Vaclav Smil imagined this illustration a few years ago – he recommends using dark sesame oil in your salad for the best visual effect. Its aim was to highlight the total dependence of our current food system on fossil fuels, used to run agricultural machinery, make fertilizer, heat greenhouses, power ships and even produce the electricity that keeps your refrigerator cool .
As he explains in his new book, How to feed the worldthis makes our food system productive enough to feed 8 billion people, and that number is growing. It also leaves it rife with inefficiency and waste, so that food production takes up more than a third of all land not covered by ice, sucks up most of the water we use, and generates nearly a third of our global greenhouse gas emissions.
Based at the University of Manitoba in Canada, Smil is best known for his work on energy consumption throughout human history. But several of his 30-plus books have focused on what we eat, including Feed the…
