When most people go and but an apple from a grocery store they do not appreciate the amount of embodied energy that’s gone into a single apple. Embodied energy is the energy invested into growing, harvesting, transporting, packaging, marketing, and selling the product. For a simple analysis of apples grown in season we will say that most of the energy is used to farm and transport them. The in season apples will need to be shipped but we will assume that the consumer can walk to the local market to get their apples. All the embodied energy comes from driving the apple from the orchard to the local market. We will say that a standard path taken by an apple starts at an orchard, then to storage where they will be graded, then transported to a wholesale market, then transported to the market, and finally picked up by the consumer. From Blanke’s calculations [34] we can estimate that the energy required to produce a local apple is about 2.8 MJ/kg.
Now we need to look at the apples when they are out of season. The Food (miles) for Thought journal [34] looks at the energy balance (or imbalance) for locally-grown apples in Germany vs. imported apples from New Zealand. They found that the imported apples only contained about 27 percent more embodied energy than those that were produced nearby. The comparison made for these German apples is probably very similar to most countries around the world when apples are out of season. The difference they found was 5.89 MJ/kg for local apples and 7.50 MJ/kg for imported apples.
We can now compare these values to a small to average apple that contains 53 calories. We will assume the apple weighs about 3.5 ounces. The energy that we get out of this one apple is only 0.4 MJ/kg.
