It’s hard to untangle the conflicting feelings of grief, frustration, exacerbation, guilt, complicity, and denial that swill around with the millions of barrels spewing from the seafloor wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon wellhead.  Progress in capping the well is maddeningly slow, perhaps because BP is only pursuing solutions that would allow them to recover “their” oil, or because the wellhead itself is perilously close to toppling, leading to a collapse of the seafloor in the immediate vicinity: a kind of slow motion chain reaction of environmental doom.  Yet again our maddening addictions come home to roost; so many people and animals are suffering, and vital ecosystem may be crippled for a long time (so much for rebuilding the natural wetlands hurricane barrier to protect the Louisiana coast from hurricane storm surge).

I’m not one to spout off about our oil problem:  I drive my car too much, I could take shorter showers, and I could stand to sweat a little more in the summer.  However, feel at liberty to take the opportunity to mention the dependence of agriculture, and specifically meat production, on fossil fuels by way of the oil spill.  I thought about making an infographic about it, but there are already too many bad oil spill infographics out there.  Instead, I’ve made some graphic-info.  I’ve done some back-of-the-napkin calculations (my own calculations are in bold, the rest are just factoids):

According to Cornell University, on average it takes 54 kilocalories (kcal) for every kilocalorie of beef protein produced in the United States.

1 gallon of gasoline equals 31,268 calories, or 31.3 kcal.

One pound of beef contains 1,000 calories, or 1 kcal.

So, 54 kcal of fossil fuel input / 31.3 kcal per gal. of gasoline = 1.73 gal. of gasoline per 1 lb of beef.

One barrel (bbl) of oil produces about 28 gallons of gasoline.

28 gal. per barrel / 1.73 gal. per lb. of beef = 16.18 lbs of beef per bbl of oil.

The Deepwater Horizon spill dumps 52,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico.

52,500 bbl per day x 16.18 lbs. of beef per bbl of oil = 849,500 lbs of beef per day that could have been produced by the spilled oil.

The average American eats 0.25 lbs of beef a day (95 lbs per year).

849,500 lbs of beef could provide 3.398 million Americans with their quarter pound per day of beef.

From the beginning of the spill 7.8 million barrels have been spilled.  That amounts to 126,204,000 lbs of beef by my reckoning.  Or 504,816,000 Quarter-Pounders with or without cheese.

To wrap up the calculations, 609 million barrels of our over 7.5 billion barrels of crude oil consumed annually goes to the agricultural production of beef.  This includes transport costs of animal, product, and feed, chemical fertilizer production, and so on.  But I could be wrong.

Please don’t misunderstand me:  this all is not to say that the oil spill will affect our food supply, or that people will go hungry as a result.  I want to make a connection between our demand for cheap fuels and our over-consumption of meat made artificially cheap by those fuels and subsidy.