two hardboiled eggs

Last night, I found myself wandering around my local Fred Meyer while Karen was doing some banking. We really didn't have anything major on the shopping list (but, of course, while there, picked up a few things).

In the deli/produce section, I amused myself (!) by reading the labels on various processed foods, marveling at the distance they had traveled and the plastic packaging in which they traveled, when my eyes landed on what I propose to be the most successful product-that-should-not-exist.

It was a bunch of plastic containers, each securely cradling two hard-boiled eggs, for 99 cents, from Minnesota. Having now reached the final 3rd of the "Omnivore's Dilemma", I cannot look at something like this without mentally tabulating all the petroleum that went into it.

In the following summary, the letter P stands for 'petroleum'.

First of all, there is P to grow the corn that fed the chickens who laid the eggs, not to mention the P expended in transporting the corn to the chickens. The eggs are transported to the processing-plant (more P), where they are cooked (P) and packaged (P, unless the electricity came from coal) into the plastic containers (that were made elsewhere out of P and transported to the packaging plant using P). Finally, the packaged eggs were distributed around the country (P) to my local store, where they can be sold for 99 cents (with everyone along the entire supply-line making enough of a profit to justify the effort).

How can this be? Simple. As Michael Pollan makes clear, society is hiding the costs of cheap food, which explains how you can get a delicious (?) spicy-chicken burrito at your local Taco Bell for $1.29.

I can't look at food now, without thinking about all that went into bringing it before me. I especially can't look at beef, but that's another part of the story.