How much food do you consume in a lifetime?

[Aemilius]

5,5 pounds ( 2,5 kg) in a day,
2007 pounds ( 912,5 kg) in a year,
if you live until 78 this will make 156 546 pounds ( 71 175 kg) of food in a lifetime.

This is one estimate found in the Youtube. Others give somewhat lower numbers dependng on your sex, constitution and eating habits, but it will likely be more than 20 metric tons (20 000kg)!
I don't know if the water or liquid consumed is included in the 5,5 pounds ( 2,5kg) per day.
For the purposes of buddhist meditation/contemplation you would also need to know the amount of air breathed during a lifetime.
Now you can easily contemplate how your body is composed of the elements of matter(food), liquid(drink) and air, and that it is not self-existing.
You can add to the contemplation how the various foods and drinks that you consume depend on many factors, like soil, water, sunlight, fertilizer, agricultural workers, transportation systems, truckdrivers, seamen, ships, trains, customs, shopkeepers, governments, ministers, persons who make clothes for the government officials and persons who cut their hair,...

[mechashivaz]

5,5 pounds ( 2,5 kg) in a day,
2007 pounds ( 912,5 kg) in a year,
if you live until 78 this will make 156 546 pounds ( 71 175 kg) of food in a lifetime.

This is one estimate found in the Youtube. Others give somewhat lower numbers dependng on your sex, constitution and eating habits, but it will likely be more than 20 metric tons (20 000kg)!
I don't know if the water or liquid consumed is included in the 5,5 pounds ( 2,5kg) per day.
For the purposes of buddhist meditation/contemplation you would also need to know the amount of air breathed during a lifetime.
Now you can easily contemplate how your body is composed of the elements of matter(food), liquid(drink) and air, and that it is not self-existing.
You can add to the contemplation how the various foods and drinks that you consume depend on many factors, like soil, water, sunlight, fertilizer, agricultural workers, transportation systems, truckdrivers, seamen, ships, trains, customs, shopkeepers, governments, ministers, persons who make clothes for the government officials and persons who cut their hair,...

Don't forget to contemplate all the animal lives lost clear cutting land for crops and meat. Or how about the indigenous populations murdered and displaced, especially in the Americas. You could even contemplate the formation of the planet, solar system, universe, and potential multiverse the universe sprang from. Should we contemplate what happens to our food post digestion too?

[Kim O'Hara]

Should we contemplate what happens to our food post digestion too?

Why not? It's all instructive, helping to place us correctly in relation to the rest of the world. And it's similar, in a way, to the meditations on death and decay, isn't it?


Kim

[Giovanni]

Would contemplating these matters help in achieving the end of birth and death?
I am not saying that it wouldn’t. I am posing the question.

[Aemilius]

I thought about the law of conservation of mass/energy. Also, there are suttas/sutras where Shakyamuni enumerates all the waste products of the human body, i.e. matter is discharged from the body in many ways, like tears, saliva, snot, sweat, old skin, nails, hair, beard, body hairs, urine, earwax and faeces. This is included in the insight meditation topics traditionally.

Now the thing is that some of the chemical energy contained in the food that we consume transforms into the energy we use for the movement and functioning of our body, (large part of this energy is used by our brains).

The waste products of the body plus the energy generated in our body should be equal to the mass and energy of the food/drink/oxygen that we intake.

[mechashivaz]

Should we contemplate what happens to our food post digestion too?

Why not? It's all instructive, helping to place us correctly in relation to the rest of the world. And it's similar, in a way, to the meditations on death and decay, isn't it?


Kim

I think its an exercise with diminishing returns. Once you've ascertained how things function on myriad levels there's no need to do it over and over. Like once you learned to tie your shoe you don't just go around tying your shoes for fun, there's more important things to do.

[Kim O'Hara]

I thought about the law of conservation of mass/energy. Also, there are suttas/sutras where Shakyamuni enumerates all the waste products of the human body, i.e. matter is discharged from the body in many ways, like tears, saliva, snot, sweat, old skin, nails, hair, beard, body hairs, urine, earwax and faeces. This is included in the insight meditation topics traditionally.

Now the thing is that some of the chemical energy contained in the food that we consume transforms into the energy we use for the movement and functioning of our body, (large part of this energy is used by our brains).

The waste products of the body plus the energy generated in our body should be equal to the mass and energy of the food/drink/oxygen that we intake.

Don't confuse Einstein's mass-energy equivalence with the conservation of mass and conservation of energy.
In our daily life, mass is conserved (so what we eat = what we excrete plus what we incorporate into our bodies) and energy is conserved (although it changes constantly from chemical energy to heat energy in our bodies) but no mass is converted to energy.


Kim

[Kim O'Hara]

I did a quick search on your topic title and found https://www.nationalgeographic.com/what-the-world-eats/ which has a lot more detail via interactive pie charts. It's actually quite (quiet, nerdy) fun to explore.

The world average is about 1.8 kg / day but people in rich countries (that's most of us here on DW) average about 2.5 kg / day. That's about 50 - 70 tons in a lifetime respectively. Those figures don't include water, BTW, but do include alcoholic drinks.
Bare-survival quantities (e.g. Somalia) are just under 1 kg / day.


Kim

[Aemilius]

I thought about the law of conservation of mass/energy. Also, there are suttas/sutras where Shakyamuni enumerates all the waste products of the human body, i.e. matter is discharged from the body in many ways, like tears, saliva, snot, sweat, old skin, nails, hair, beard, body hairs, urine, earwax and faeces. This is included in the insight meditation topics traditionally.

Now the thing is that some of the chemical energy contained in the food that we consume transforms into the energy we use for the movement and functioning of our body, (large part of this energy is used by our brains).

The waste products of the body plus the energy generated in our body should be equal to the mass and energy of the food/drink/oxygen that we intake.

Don't confuse Einstein's mass-energy equivalence with the conservation of mass and conservation of energy.
In our daily life, mass is conserved (so what we eat = what we excrete plus what we incorporate into our bodies) and energy is conserved (although it changes constantly from chemical energy to heat energy in our bodies) but no mass is converted to energy.


Kim

Thanks for your clarification. I was thinking of photosynthesis and endothermic/exothermic chemical reactions. I had also left out that we breath out H2O and CO2 with every outbreath. And that our bodies radiate heat to the surroundings constantly. One doesn't want to get too abstruse and complicated.