Musing on biscuits
July 2009 (index)
Some more thoughts, following on from an earlier article containing this picture:
Some biscuits
According to the label it only takes 28½ biscuits (425g) to provide a day's energy needs. Based on a price of 71p for a 500g packet that energy costs about 60p a day.
Scale up to a year and you can feed yourself for about £220. That's roughly 1% of average earnings (in the UK).
To get your daily energy requirements from cucumbers would require eating 70 of the things (at about 30kcal each). If you pay 50p for each one that's £35 a day or nearly £13,000 a year, about 50% of average earnings. So biscuits deliver about 50 times as much energy per price.
Admittedly you don't get a perfectly balanced diet from just biscuits (or just cucumbers), although the "% Adult GDA Per Biscuit" figures suggest they're not bad. A figure of 3.5% (=1/28½) for every item would be balanced, and they aren't too far away from that.
Energy of 2000kcal per day is equivalent to about 2.5kWh. If you could power yourself from mains electricity (do not try this) that would cost about 25p per day (at 10p per unit). So as a source of energy the biscuits are only a little more than twice as expensive as electricity. It seems reasonable that the costs aren't wildly different given that crops are used as biofuels.
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