Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Monday, May 28, 2012
Milkin' the Banana Smoothie
World's Best, Easiest, Cheapest, Most Delicious, Nutritious Smoothie Tutorial
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Wasson Way Project
Tonight, I come away extremely excited about the transformation my neighborhood and city is about to take in the direction of awesomeness. There is a ton of work to do yet, but after Susie organized tonight's guided tour with some of the leaders, it feels inevitable that the underdogs that dreamed up the Wasson Way Project will successfully build a key 6.5 mile stretch of bike trail down the street from me, linking Xavier University to the Little Miami Scenic Trail through our neighborhood.
This means over 120,000 residents will have easy access to over 100 miles of gorgeous, safe, fun, and functional bike path. That means that the 4,000 residents within 1,000 feet of the path can expect their property values to go up by $9,000. That's $36 million! It also means that over 10,000 pedestrians per summer weekend will be injecting local businesses with new life and new opportunities. That means my community essentially becomes beachfront property. It also means that Cincinnati is one step closer to becoming the coolest bike town in the Midwest!
The challenge for traditional economists is putting a dollar value on these kinds of social welfare projects. But if you ask a person (or conduct a study) about what makes them happy, it is the quality of life that matters and connections. Then economists come in and find a proxy for quality and try to quantify it, at which point, the quality is no longer a quality, but a quantity. But just for a moment, let us think of ways in which the Wasson Way Project could bring value to the community, and not just hypothetical real estate price increases. How would you put a price tag on the following benefits?
-interactions with their neighbors-- fostering a spirit of reciprocity and connectedness
-experiencing other neighborhoods-- quite literally walking in new people's shoes
-being active and healthy-- spending less time sedentary, depressed, and medicated
-spending less money on gas and less time in polluted traffic jams- one of the biggest causes of people's stress
-decompressing from work on a bike ride home rather than coming home agitated and ornery and bent on divorce
-dollars circulated locally with opportunities for local tourism
-more people feeling safe on their bikes/rollerblades/scooters/etc and learning to love playing again
-closeness to nature and some of the city's best natural assets.
From the Wasson Way Facebook site, I ripped the following self-description of the project:
Did you know there are 6.5 miles of unused railroad tracks running through some of the most popular parks, residential and shopping areas in Cincinnati...?
The Wasson Road railroad tracks - the tracks running through Xavier, past Buskens and the Hyde Park Kroger - span the neighborhoods of Evanston, Norwood, Hyde Park, Oakley, Mt Lookout, Fairfax, and Mariemont. The trail begins at Xavier Univers...ity, passes by Withrow High School, Rookwood Pavilion, Hyde Park Plaza, Ault Park, and ends at the beginning of the 78 mile Little Miami Bike Trail. You can go all the way to Dayton, OH or Urbana, OH on this trail! In the future, it will also connect to Cincinnati's riverfront via the Ohio River Way Trail (which is under construction and also needs your support!). (http://www.ohioriverway.org/ohio-river-trail/)
Please note that these tracks still belong to the railroad company, but they haven't been used for over two years. We are a group of volunteers supporting the transformation of this right-of-way into a bike and pedestrian path. We hope you will join our efforts! The first step you can take towards supporting us is by becoming our Facebook fan!
One of the more exciting factoids I learned tonight was that the City of Cincinnati owns a critical stretch of railroad that basically links Detroit with several key auto-part manufacturing towns to Chattanooga, TN. It leases this track to Norfolk Southern for the price of $15,000,000 per year. This seems like a hefty incentive for Norfolk Southern to make Cincinnati happy by granting the right of way for Wasson Way, so that Cincinnati can make Norfolk Southern happy with cheaper rent to Chattanooga.
 |
| Me. Trespassing. |
This means over 120,000 residents will have easy access to over 100 miles of gorgeous, safe, fun, and functional bike path. That means that the 4,000 residents within 1,000 feet of the path can expect their property values to go up by $9,000. That's $36 million! It also means that over 10,000 pedestrians per summer weekend will be injecting local businesses with new life and new opportunities. That means my community essentially becomes beachfront property. It also means that Cincinnati is one step closer to becoming the coolest bike town in the Midwest!
 |
| We had over 30 people for the 3 mile tour to Red Bank overpass. |
The challenge for traditional economists is putting a dollar value on these kinds of social welfare projects. But if you ask a person (or conduct a study) about what makes them happy, it is the quality of life that matters and connections. Then economists come in and find a proxy for quality and try to quantify it, at which point, the quality is no longer a quality, but a quantity. But just for a moment, let us think of ways in which the Wasson Way Project could bring value to the community, and not just hypothetical real estate price increases. How would you put a price tag on the following benefits?
-interactions with their neighbors-- fostering a spirit of reciprocity and connectedness
-experiencing other neighborhoods-- quite literally walking in new people's shoes
-being active and healthy-- spending less time sedentary, depressed, and medicated
-spending less money on gas and less time in polluted traffic jams- one of the biggest causes of people's stress
-decompressing from work on a bike ride home rather than coming home agitated and ornery and bent on divorce
-dollars circulated locally with opportunities for local tourism
-more people feeling safe on their bikes/rollerblades/scooters/etc and learning to love playing again
-closeness to nature and some of the city's best natural assets.
 |
| My happy wife Susie striking a pose beneath the Marburg Ave bridge (my street!) |
From the Wasson Way Facebook site, I ripped the following self-description of the project:
Did you know there are 6.5 miles of unused railroad tracks running through some of the most popular parks, residential and shopping areas in Cincinnati...?
The Wasson Road railroad tracks - the tracks running through Xavier, past Buskens and the Hyde Park Kroger - span the neighborhoods of Evanston, Norwood, Hyde Park, Oakley, Mt Lookout, Fairfax, and Mariemont. The trail begins at Xavier Univers...ity, passes by Withrow High School, Rookwood Pavilion, Hyde Park Plaza, Ault Park, and ends at the beginning of the 78 mile Little Miami Bike Trail. You can go all the way to Dayton, OH or Urbana, OH on this trail! In the future, it will also connect to Cincinnati's riverfront via the Ohio River Way Trail (which is under construction and also needs your support!). (http://www.ohioriverway.org/ohio-river-trail/)
Please note that these tracks still belong to the railroad company, but they haven't been used for over two years. We are a group of volunteers supporting the transformation of this right-of-way into a bike and pedestrian path. We hope you will join our efforts! The first step you can take towards supporting us is by becoming our Facebook fan!
One of the more exciting factoids I learned tonight was that the City of Cincinnati owns a critical stretch of railroad that basically links Detroit with several key auto-part manufacturing towns to Chattanooga, TN. It leases this track to Norfolk Southern for the price of $15,000,000 per year. This seems like a hefty incentive for Norfolk Southern to make Cincinnati happy by granting the right of way for Wasson Way, so that Cincinnati can make Norfolk Southern happy with cheaper rent to Chattanooga.
 |
| Ault Park Trestle could be the sweetest part of the path. It almost looks like part of The Beast roller coaster without the tunnel. |
 |
| There's the greatest roller coaster tunnel of all time. |
Monday, April 23, 2012
Earth Day at UC's Green Marketing Class
I'm sorry I've been MIA for about a month now, but I've got a good excuse. It wasn't exactly Burning Man, but this weekend's epic-ness was worth the wait = 4:20 + Earth Day + my dad, brother Matty, and I co-teaching Green Marking, our yearly MBA class at UC, with my brothers John and Matty attending as students. It was like the perfect hippie storm.
This picture is in the eye of the storm and there's more going on here than meets the eye. It was taken by a Chinese graduate student that my dad admitted to the program. It was taken in front of an un-necessarily-illuminated bulletin board at the College of Business with no bulletins on a beautiful day where there is plenty of natural light. Matty D had just delivered a riveting talk on Permaculture and you might be able to detect that he pitted-out from fielding the most intense questions of any presentation all weekend. My belly has a weird bulge where my shirt had become un-tucked beneath my sweater from spending the previous 15 minutes cleaning our classroom's decked-out buffet table-- the implicit curriculum. (It was stocked all weekend with fresh produce and local eats from Melt, Dewey's Pizza, Coffee Emporium, Shadeau Bakery.) My dynamo-dad has much more energy than he had last year since he didn't have to lecture nearly as much, as there were many more brilliant students and presenters this year, contributing to the discussion.
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| (L-R) BD, John Michael, Matty D, Chris (moi) |
Similar to Burning Man, there was lots of nakedness this year too--Naked "monster juice" that is. We didn't talk about it much during the course of the class, but food issues are Issue-AAA1 in terms of opportunity to address the biggest issues-- energy, pollution, soil depletion, monopolies, fairness, healthy bodies, healthy communities, and delicious FUN. But that's all I'm going to say about that today.
The explicit curriculum included the following:
PRESENTATION 1- Steve Burns from Amp Electric Vehicles discusses his projections for the electrification of the automobile, tells the amp story and gives test-rides in the retrofitted Mercedez-Benz SUV. (Fun fact of the day-- to maintain the heating in the car that you'd expect from a Mercedez HVAC sysetm, the electric motor has to boil water under the hood.)
PRESENTATION 2- Dr. Frederick Dwyer- discusses Resrouce Advantage Theory and the work of one of his Michigan State Spartan mentors-- Shelby Hunt.
PRESENTATION 3- Larry Falkin from The City of Cincinnati's Office of Environmental Quality discusses Cincinnati's progress implementing the Green Cincinnati Plan.
PRESENTATION 4- Chris Dwyer- discusses Ecological Economics and various metrics of "green".
 |
| From the HappyPlanetIndex.org |
PRESENTATION 6- Steve Melink, CEO and founder of Melink Corporation, discusses his company's commitment to walking the walk-- converting their headquarters into a "net zero" facility.
PRESENTATION 7- Chris Dwyer discusses Systems Theory and the typical traps that complicated systems fall into.
PRESENTATION 8- Dr. Frederick Dwyer discusses Mindful Consumption and differentiates between "green" markets versus "green" outcomes.
PRESENTATION 9- author and movie producer Pat Murphy from Yellow Springs' Community Solutions discusses concepts from his book Plan C and his documentary The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.
PRESENTATION 10- Recent S.C.A.D sculptor/graduate and footballer extraordinaire, Matty Dwyer discusses the principles of Permaculture, global solutions to modern agriculture's constraints and the progress of his own urban food forest experiments in what used to be his soccer field in Oakley.
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| Matty and Dad just planted an orchard of fruit trees, including apple, paw-paw, persimmon, and plum. |
Marketing, at its best, is about moving economies to human needs. It's
about finding, serving, and maintaining value and relationships.
Oftentimes, the marketer pushes the right lever, but in the wrong
direction. Such is the behavior of gnarly systems when we don't
understand their complexity and the best ways in which to leverage a
system.
When the class finished, our heads were spinning. We collectively discussed how utterly frustrated and humbled we all were at the prospects of having to go back to work on Monday, and simply not have all the answers for some of the civilization's most formidable challenges. "How could my efforts possibly have an effect?"
I certainly don't have the answer, but I'll end with what is my biggest take away from the weekend-- words of wisdom, channeled through Matty:
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. "
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| Papa Dwyer planting a paw-paw tree in his and Matty's future food forest. |
My dad is my hero.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
VO2 Max Test Results
Friday, I finally connected with the famous Dr. Will Peveler from Northern Kentucky University. He is a cycling expert and director of NKU's Human Performance Laboratory. He has been busy researching pacing strategies through extensive testing of competitive cyclists/triathletes. Locals are happy to volunteer to be his lab rats, since it means an opportunity for a free VO2 Max test, which can normally cost a couple hundred buck$.
To prepare for the VO2 test, I took Thursday off from workouts. I woke up at 6 am and ate ~500 calories of dates and about a liter of water. When I got to the lab, it looked like one part Nerd-Jock-Heaven and one part Pit of Despair. Dr. Will took my height, weight, percent body fat and a general health questionnaire.
Dr. Will set me up with a relatively comfy fit despite the fact that the bike kinda looked like it once belonged to Jerry Seinfeld's dad. But this is the option if you only bring your SPD cleats.
Then Dr. Will puts the face mask on you. There are other VO2 tests which don't require a mask, but do require taking blood. Regarding the blood-draw method, Dr. Will said, "The inflection point is harder to find." I didn't slow the fast-talking doctor down to ask what he meant (or to insist on a blood draw), but I think you'll see what he means when we look at my results.
Once I had the mask firmly on my face, I had to pedal the bike above 90 revolutions per minute for the duration of the test. Every two minutes, Dr. Will would add an increment of resistance. Through the feedback of my heart rate monitor and the breathing monitor, he was able to push me and push me until I reached failure. So, it was I who decided when the test was over.
I had mentally prepared to embrace the pain cave all week, but failure is never an easy place to go, even if we do it several times per week in Spinning. I lasted about 15 minutes before I tapped out. Maybe I could have gone more, but in addition to the effort being extremely hard, having the mask restrict my breathing made me feel claustrophobic and panicky-- a bit too far beyond my "comfort zone" of normal excruciating pain.
Dr. Will gave me a two page print-out of a table of numbers, which is difficult to make sense of. But once I put them in graphical form, it's a bit more intuitive to see what's going on and it seems to match what I saw Dr. Will looking at on his computer monitor.
RESULTS
The red line is where I blew up and terminated the test. The intersection of the red line and purple line (VO2/kg) is the ultimate goal of what we are looking for-- VO2 MAX. In other words, what is the largest volume of oxygen my body can breathe in and make use of to burn its fuel in my cells. It was 68.7 ml/kg/min (or 4.78 L/min). At this point of maximum effort, my cycling heart rate is 189 beats per minute. Note that your maximum heart rate is not usually equivalent across sports and it's a physiological feature that many experts say cannot be changed. Your max is your max. It's not bad. It's not good. It just is. But my VO2 max value of 68.7 ml/kg/min definitely can be changed. It's my goal to bump it up.
OTHER STUFF
As you can see, my heart rate is indicated in orange and increases as Dr. Will adds resistance and as time passes (horizontal axis). The green line has something to do with my "ventilation" rate. It stays pretty much parallel with my heart rate until it reaches the aqua line-- my "Threshold". At this point, ventilation and heart rate de-couple. This is what Dr. Will meant by "inflection point". It is the super-critical point, called The Lactate Threshold (or Anaerobic Threshold), beyond which lactate is produced in the muscles faster than it can be removed. This is where your exercise activity crosses over from being primarily aerobic to primarily anaerobic. So, 171 beats per minute is my threshold heart rate. This completely agrees with my suspicion from low-tech DIY thresholds tests at Spinning class. It is also the heart rate I tend to average for a 40k time trial. Cycling guru, Joe Friel, refers to this pace as your Critical Power 60 (CR60)-- as in, this is the maximum power you can sustain for 60 minutes. He also calls it Functional Threshold Power (FTP).
Dr. Will said the highest VO2 max he had ever tested on someone was 79-80 ml/kg/min. He also said that a sedentary college aged male measures at about 35 ml/kg/min. Cross country skiers are famous for having VO2 max's in the 90s ml/kg/min! But what does it all mean? How can I get faster?
The most important outcome for me for this experiment was to find my threshold. This has far more relevance to my race pace than VO2 max. In fact, maximum power is not the determining factor of race victories; rather, your efficiency at sub-max levels is more predictive of endurance race success.
The secret to improving your race pace is to train just below, at, around, about your lactate threshold. With smarter training through the season, bigger efforts should be perceived as more manageable and sustainable. At this point in the spring season, 171 bpm is 89% of my max heart rate. As the season progresses, I might be able to race for one hour at 95% of my max heart rate.
FYI
While searching some cycling forums, I found that world class pro rider Ivan Basso achieved the following results on his VO2 Max test:
VO2 Max Test
VO2 5.760 L/min
VCO2 6.458 L/min
VO2/kg 83.5 mL/kg/min
VCO2/kg 93.6 mL/kg/min
VE(BTPS) 215.8 L/min
Max HR: 196
Max Power: 490 Watts
Max Power to weight ratio: 7.1 Watt/kg
Ananerobic Threshold
VO2 4.680 L/min
VCO2 4.824 L/min
VO2/kg 67.8 mL/kg/min
VCO2/kg 69.9 mL/kg/min
VE(BTPS) 129.1 L/min
AT HR: 175
AT Power: 380 Watts
FTP power to weight ratio: 5.5 Watt/kg
These are the numbers it takes to win the Giro d'Italia!
As the season progresses, I plan to get tested again and we'll see how the numbers change.
 |
| Dr. Will is Dr. Evil. But he's really nice. |
 |
Then Dr. Will puts the face mask on you. There are other VO2 tests which don't require a mask, but do require taking blood. Regarding the blood-draw method, Dr. Will said, "The inflection point is harder to find." I didn't slow the fast-talking doctor down to ask what he meant (or to insist on a blood draw), but I think you'll see what he means when we look at my results.
 |
| Special valves in the mask allow fresh air to come in from the right/white tube my exhaled CO2 to go out the left/clear tube, where it gets analyzed by the computer. The mask if VERY hard to break in. |
 |
| Darth Vader's mask is also hard to breath in. But for Darth Junior and a VO2 max test... you can't NOT ride with the mask. |
I had mentally prepared to embrace the pain cave all week, but failure is never an easy place to go, even if we do it several times per week in Spinning. I lasted about 15 minutes before I tapped out. Maybe I could have gone more, but in addition to the effort being extremely hard, having the mask restrict my breathing made me feel claustrophobic and panicky-- a bit too far beyond my "comfort zone" of normal excruciating pain.
Dr. Will gave me a two page print-out of a table of numbers, which is difficult to make sense of. But once I put them in graphical form, it's a bit more intuitive to see what's going on and it seems to match what I saw Dr. Will looking at on his computer monitor.
RESULTS
The red line is where I blew up and terminated the test. The intersection of the red line and purple line (VO2/kg) is the ultimate goal of what we are looking for-- VO2 MAX. In other words, what is the largest volume of oxygen my body can breathe in and make use of to burn its fuel in my cells. It was 68.7 ml/kg/min (or 4.78 L/min). At this point of maximum effort, my cycling heart rate is 189 beats per minute. Note that your maximum heart rate is not usually equivalent across sports and it's a physiological feature that many experts say cannot be changed. Your max is your max. It's not bad. It's not good. It just is. But my VO2 max value of 68.7 ml/kg/min definitely can be changed. It's my goal to bump it up.
OTHER STUFF
As you can see, my heart rate is indicated in orange and increases as Dr. Will adds resistance and as time passes (horizontal axis). The green line has something to do with my "ventilation" rate. It stays pretty much parallel with my heart rate until it reaches the aqua line-- my "Threshold". At this point, ventilation and heart rate de-couple. This is what Dr. Will meant by "inflection point". It is the super-critical point, called The Lactate Threshold (or Anaerobic Threshold), beyond which lactate is produced in the muscles faster than it can be removed. This is where your exercise activity crosses over from being primarily aerobic to primarily anaerobic. So, 171 beats per minute is my threshold heart rate. This completely agrees with my suspicion from low-tech DIY thresholds tests at Spinning class. It is also the heart rate I tend to average for a 40k time trial. Cycling guru, Joe Friel, refers to this pace as your Critical Power 60 (CR60)-- as in, this is the maximum power you can sustain for 60 minutes. He also calls it Functional Threshold Power (FTP).
Dr. Will said the highest VO2 max he had ever tested on someone was 79-80 ml/kg/min. He also said that a sedentary college aged male measures at about 35 ml/kg/min. Cross country skiers are famous for having VO2 max's in the 90s ml/kg/min! But what does it all mean? How can I get faster?
The most important outcome for me for this experiment was to find my threshold. This has far more relevance to my race pace than VO2 max. In fact, maximum power is not the determining factor of race victories; rather, your efficiency at sub-max levels is more predictive of endurance race success.
The secret to improving your race pace is to train just below, at, around, about your lactate threshold. With smarter training through the season, bigger efforts should be perceived as more manageable and sustainable. At this point in the spring season, 171 bpm is 89% of my max heart rate. As the season progresses, I might be able to race for one hour at 95% of my max heart rate.
FYI
While searching some cycling forums, I found that world class pro rider Ivan Basso achieved the following results on his VO2 Max test:
VO2 Max Test
VO2 5.760 L/min
VCO2 6.458 L/min
VO2/kg 83.5 mL/kg/min
VCO2/kg 93.6 mL/kg/min
VE(BTPS) 215.8 L/min
Max HR: 196
Max Power: 490 Watts
Max Power to weight ratio: 7.1 Watt/kg
Ananerobic Threshold
VO2 4.680 L/min
VCO2 4.824 L/min
VO2/kg 67.8 mL/kg/min
VCO2/kg 69.9 mL/kg/min
VE(BTPS) 129.1 L/min
AT HR: 175
AT Power: 380 Watts
FTP power to weight ratio: 5.5 Watt/kg
These are the numbers it takes to win the Giro d'Italia!
 |
| Real men wear pink (in Italy especially). |
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Highlights for Kids
In a short stretch of just three mile along my ride to work, I can play a real life game of Highlights for Kids with the city's bike lane signage. Spot the Difference!
I try to come up with unique names for all the different personalities that show up.
 | |
| Squatty Floating Mushroom Head (AKA Dwyer's Grotesque Shoulder) |
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| Chevron Ghost Rider |
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| Elongated Mushroom Head Mime |
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| Virgin and Child |
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| Layin' it on Thick |
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| Shin-Splitter Squatty Mushroom Head |
Sunday, March 11, 2012
53 Miles per Burrito and My Two Moms
Let's talk about yields-- squeezing a buffulo out of a nickel, blood out of a turnip, or milk out of grass. Wait...what? That's right-- getting something from "nothing". But first, let's talk about getting nothing from everything.
Nothing from Everything
It takes a cow in Ohio about 2 hours of "work" to eat 9 lbs of dry grass. Then, through the magic of metabolism in a four-chambered gut, 1 gallon of non-chocolate milk can come vaccumed out of her wriggly teat, ready to drink, if you're a raw milk drinker. My lovely biological mom, Mother #1 (God bless her), loves the stuff.
Assuming her 20 mile round trip to pick up one gallon of raw milk takes place in an average two ton car, getting 20 miles per gallon, she probably pays less for the gas than she does for the milk even though the oil is pumped from miles beneath the earth/ocean, refined, and possibly shipped from a combat zone half-way around the world. (Only 7% of oil comes from a "free" country, says Freedom House).
It took about 200,000 lbs of ancient plants and millions of years of horrible conversion rates and geologic abracadabra to get just 1 gallon of oil. That's equivalent to 40 acres of harvested wheat, roots, and stalks to drive just one 20 mile round-trip to the milk co-op. 98 tons of plants per gallon! It isn't exactly nothing from everything, but it's pretty close.
Something from Nothing
My wife's lovely burrito-loving mother, Mother #2, gifted me the sticker version of the famous T-shirt below. By now you've probably seen the "53 Miles per Burrito" T-shirt (or the back of one) worn by cycling-enthusiasts.
Have you ever asked yourself, What does it all mean?
For the sake of peer review, here are some of my own rough calculations:
If I ride my bike 20 miles/hour, I burn about 10 calories/minute. That comes to 1 mile/30 cal.
(By "calorie", we're talking food calories which are technically kilocalories.) I've looked up the nutrition information for the the veggie burrito bowl I typically order at Chipotle and it comes to ~600 calories, depending on the heftiness of that guacamole scoop, which I hope is quite hefty. So the mileage I would get out of my $6.25 burrito bowl is about 20 miles' worth. That's almost the price of two gallons of gas. Worth it? You bet! When you consider the benefits and enjoyment of riding the bike you don't even need to factor in all the externalized costs of oil (i.e. environmental degradation, war, sickness, traffic jams) that don't get paid at the pump.
Of course, one could go farther than 20 miles on one burrito if they were to ride slower than 20 miles/hr. This is because of the force of wind resistance quadruples even if speed merely doubles. Furthermore, most people's non-Taco-Bellian burritos are quite a bit bulkier than mine-- overflowing with the calorie-dense extras that I don't get-- meat, cheese, and sour cream. When the burritos get in the 1000 calorie range, then you have no choice but to ride quite a bit slower than 20 mph, thus improving your efficiency. So, 53 mpg is realistic...depending on fitness level, body shape, bycicle type, weight, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Fun food math
Big ass burrito: $6.95 for 1000 calories = 153 cal/$.
Big Hamburger at McWhatshisname's: $3.79 for 540 calories = 142 cal/$.
8 banana smoothie (2 lbs): $1.00 for 800 calories = 800 cal/$.
3 cantaloupe smoothie: $6.00 for 900 calories = 150 cal/$
Not only does the banana win the calorie per $ value meal championship, but even when shipped by fossil fuel-powered boat, it's carbon footprint is still tiny compared to almost all foods, except maybe the dandelion greens from my back yard.
Nothing from Everything
It takes a cow in Ohio about 2 hours of "work" to eat 9 lbs of dry grass. Then, through the magic of metabolism in a four-chambered gut, 1 gallon of non-chocolate milk can come vaccumed out of her wriggly teat, ready to drink, if you're a raw milk drinker. My lovely biological mom, Mother #1 (God bless her), loves the stuff.
Assuming her 20 mile round trip to pick up one gallon of raw milk takes place in an average two ton car, getting 20 miles per gallon, she probably pays less for the gas than she does for the milk even though the oil is pumped from miles beneath the earth/ocean, refined, and possibly shipped from a combat zone half-way around the world. (Only 7% of oil comes from a "free" country, says Freedom House).
It took about 200,000 lbs of ancient plants and millions of years of horrible conversion rates and geologic abracadabra to get just 1 gallon of oil. That's equivalent to 40 acres of harvested wheat, roots, and stalks to drive just one 20 mile round-trip to the milk co-op. 98 tons of plants per gallon! It isn't exactly nothing from everything, but it's pretty close.
Something from Nothing
My wife's lovely burrito-loving mother, Mother #2, gifted me the sticker version of the famous T-shirt below. By now you've probably seen the "53 Miles per Burrito" T-shirt (or the back of one) worn by cycling-enthusiasts.
 |
For the sake of peer review, here are some of my own rough calculations:
If I ride my bike 20 miles/hour, I burn about 10 calories/minute. That comes to 1 mile/30 cal.
(By "calorie", we're talking food calories which are technically kilocalories.) I've looked up the nutrition information for the the veggie burrito bowl I typically order at Chipotle and it comes to ~600 calories, depending on the heftiness of that guacamole scoop, which I hope is quite hefty. So the mileage I would get out of my $6.25 burrito bowl is about 20 miles' worth. That's almost the price of two gallons of gas. Worth it? You bet! When you consider the benefits and enjoyment of riding the bike you don't even need to factor in all the externalized costs of oil (i.e. environmental degradation, war, sickness, traffic jams) that don't get paid at the pump.
Of course, one could go farther than 20 miles on one burrito if they were to ride slower than 20 miles/hr. This is because of the force of wind resistance quadruples even if speed merely doubles. Furthermore, most people's non-Taco-Bellian burritos are quite a bit bulkier than mine-- overflowing with the calorie-dense extras that I don't get-- meat, cheese, and sour cream. When the burritos get in the 1000 calorie range, then you have no choice but to ride quite a bit slower than 20 mph, thus improving your efficiency. So, 53 mpg is realistic...depending on fitness level, body shape, bycicle type, weight, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Fun food math
Big ass burrito: $6.95 for 1000 calories = 153 cal/$.
Big Hamburger at McWhatshisname's: $3.79 for 540 calories = 142 cal/$.
8 banana smoothie (2 lbs): $1.00 for 800 calories = 800 cal/$.
3 cantaloupe smoothie: $6.00 for 900 calories = 150 cal/$
Not only does the banana win the calorie per $ value meal championship, but even when shipped by fossil fuel-powered boat, it's carbon footprint is still tiny compared to almost all foods, except maybe the dandelion greens from my back yard.
 |
| A dandee-lion! Must be the last one of the season. -Sid |
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