Argo Blog

Here’s an idea that will make your head spin. The Omnivore’s Dilemma says: “Unless you grew up on organic food, most of the kilo or so of nitrogen in your body was fixed by the Haber-Bosch process.” The Haber-Bosch process is the method used to make ammonium nitrate fertilizer out of petroleum. Nitrogen is one of the body’s basic but essential building blocks like carbon. So, this means: if you are the average American, approximately two pounds of your body weight or about 1% is literally composed of petroleum by products, most likely Saudia Arabian oil.

So considering conservative estimates show it takes approximately 0.5-1 gallons of oil to grow 1 bushel of corn (not including processing this into other food stuffs and shipping them to your store), and corn is used to make sugar, starch, feed cows (accounting for beef and dairy products) and tens of thousands of other things, and considering when you are eating corn based products, you are essentially eating oil, it makes me wonder if riding a bicycle, burning more calories and thus eating more, and demanding more food be grown and shipped, is an environmentally friendly thing.

Read the update.