Rody on any other day but Halloween

Taking big, inappropriate, gushing, chomping bites of the homegrown apple I thought about how this nice little ball of fructose and pectin came to be. It's all pretty simple really.  The sun shines down and through a little miracle called photosynthesis and utilization of water and carbon etc. Voila! The 'energy' then, that brought this sweet little package to me, came from the sun and, of course, me walking over and picking it off of the tree. My thoughts then turned, in turn, from apple juice on my chin to the other apple in the crisper drawer and how it got to be there.  I realized the story was a bit more complicated.  Of course the fundamentals are there such as the sun, photosynthesis, water, carbon and maybe even someone picking it. It might be that it was mechanically harvested by some big machine.  Maybe that apple is organic, if not somewhere along the line somebody turned petrochemical products into such fantastical things as fertilizer and pesticides and doused the general area around this developing apple with these things.  It's possible that the oil that produced the petro based products had to be pumped out of the ground over in the Middle East somewhere then shipped to a refinery before becoming chemically appropriate to apply to foodstuffs.

After being picked, this apple - organic or not - ended up on a truck (diesel powered most likely) and shipped to a distribution location where, after a brief, comfortable, refrigerated (electricity provided by either: a) burning natural gas... b) burning coal... c) nuclear fission...or d) large hydro) stint hitched a ride in another truck (a little more diesel) and came to the produce section at the local store (electricity [lights, refrigeration etc. again]) before the semi final leg to my house; the final leg being a trip through my digestive tract. I suppose one of the things that can be gleaned from this journey is that just about everything that makes its way into our lives has something called 'embodied energy' associated with it.  This is the energy that was required to produce and deliver this item to us for our enjoyment.  The shoes we wear, the vehicles we drive and, of course the food we eat.  Energy is a fact of life.  It's everywhere around us and even inside us.  As a matter of fact everything is energy E=MC^2!  Being aware of the big picture means that we can make decisions about what we use and how we use it. Back to the apples.  The homegrown apple may not have been as genetically coifed as the store bought but I think its pedigree is a bit more appealing to me. This is parallel to how I perceive power.  I choose, when I can, to get my electricity from solar power and my fuel from something called biodiesel - a plant based fuel for my diesel vehicles; I like their pedigrees. There may be times when a little thought about the process of how it got there or here makes a difference in the perceived value of a thing.  Then again, apples are delicious.