The Oil We Eat.

Michael Purcell

English 11

Holly Pappas

The Oil We Eat Summary.

In the essay The Oil We Eat by Richard Manning there is a very good topic that is presented that really gets into a problem that we are all suffering from in today’s society. In this essay Richard talks about things such as the relation between Hydrocarbons and Carbohydrates, how we are misusing our resources and how we are ruining our planet by doing such.

I am one semester into my college career and already this has been a topic that has been brought up in multiple classes I am taking. Richard talks about how we are ruining our carbon footprint and how we are ruining out biomes. He talks about how people have become greedy and how wealth has taken its toll on the destruction of our ecosystems. Next to Hydrocarbons, Carbohydrates are one of the most important resources in the world today Richard gives examples of how many civilizations have actually lived off of corn, wheat and rice. These have been important pieces to the equation of longevity in different cultures since people learned to farm. There is a lot of discussion in this essay regarding energy. Manning talks about how much of it is truly lost in the inefficient agricultural industry today, how we plow away the plains to plant wheat for our bovine, when they could have actually been eating the natural grasses that were already there.

All in all, I completely 100% agree with Richard. I believe we are using our resources very irresponsibly. If we keep this up our future generations will be in tough shape in their years to come. The way food is grossly manufactured with all sorts of additives and whatnot will make our populations all very unhealthy. With the decline of nutritious natural foods there will be nothing left to do but to manufacture even more unhealthy food. Let's hope that people start capitalizing on the mistakes we have been making for hundreds of years.