Let's start from your most recent bite of Peeled Snacks and go backwards.  We have to start before you eat the snack, because if we were to move forward from there you would be so swept up in the deliciousness of our treats that you wouldn't be able to pay attention to the conversation.  And trust me, this is a conversation worth paying attention to.

So you took your Peeled Snack out of a bag that's made from oil- it started as a leaf or a dinosaur or a sea-sponge and got squished and pulverized for a few eons until it was pumped from underneath some desert by a well-armed "company man".  That oil was then shipped, via OIL, to China or Brazil where it was squished into a bag, and then shipped to the US, where someone sold it to us.  They shipped it to us using, yes, oil.

Then there's the fruit.  Our peaches and almonds and some other fruit came from down the road from our factory, but a lot of it, a LOT of it, came from far, far away.  Apples, for instance, are no longer profitable to be harvested in the US (labor's too expensive), so they get grown across the ocean before being shipped to the US.  California apricots are different from Turkish apricots, and our customers prefer the former Ottoman variety, so those too come from FAR away, via oil.

Cashews CAN'T be grown in the US- it's illegal (they too easily can be made into hooch), so they get shipped in from abroad (Mexico or India).  Cracking through their tough shells require roasting, and ALL of this requires labor, labor, labor- that's a lot of cars driving a lot of miles across California's Central Valley, or through India's Western Ghats, or along National Highway 112. 

Okay, where did you buy your Peeled Snack?  At a supermarket?  At a gym?  Wherever you bought it, it wasn't born there.  It had to ship there, burning more oil, but unfortunately it RARELY shipped there from the factory where it was made.  It probably shipped from a distributor to whom WE shipped the snacks.  That's a lot more burnt squished dinosaurs there.

Okay, how did you get to that grocery store or gym?  I bet you didn't use a sail boat.  Chances are you drove at least part of the way, employing a re-constituted sea crustacean en route.

All this oil and then some goes into so simple a product as Peeled Snacks, the simplest, most straight-forward snack in the UNIVERSE.  That's a lot of black gold, and the impact upon the environment isn't calculated in any way into the price of the commodity.  Likewise, we try not to calculate it into our price to you- we usually front the cost of shipping, cushioning our consumers from the cruel cost of crude.

Every business in America is suffering from the cost of oil and our reliance upon it.  I don't know exactly what can be done to get past the expense, but if nothing's done about energy policy in the next couple of years, consumers like Peeled Snacks will inevitably pass the cost onto our consumers.... or go out of business.

Ugly business, that oil business.