The Oil We Eat Summary

In “The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq”, Richard Manning examines the agricultural aspect of civilization. The article encompasses many things, but mainly it focuses on energy. “The journalist's rule says: follow the money…We'll follow the energy”. Richard Manning follows the food chain all the way through, as though it were more of a food web. He discusses the inefficiency of the entire food industry, from the amount of energy it takes to make a box of cereal (half a gallon) to the side effects of replacing gasoline with gasohol, Manning leaves few rocks in the field un-turned.
Manning even discovers that vegetarianism is not as good as people believe. The vegetarian's case can break down on some details. On the moral issues, vegetarians claim their habits are kinder to animals, though it is difficult to see how wiping out 99 percent of wildlife's habitat…is a kindness”. The author claims that because some farmers are so dedicated to making as much as a profit as possible, they “gut-shoot” the deer, hoping they will “limp off to the woods and die where they won't stink up the potato fields”.
The main idea of the article is that the food industry is wasteful and inefficient. Countless amounts of energy, whether in the form of fossil fuels, calories, or just simple money, are lost in the entire process. Manning explains that he is a hunter at the end, and that it is a more natural way to get nutrients because it is local, and he doesn’t destroy as much of nature when he does it. While the animal he hunts is killed, everything else in the ecosystem lives on.