Can we live without oil?

Car tires, fuel and asphalt - our reliance on oil.

There are millions of different things in our daily lives that are made from oil. Chances are you are holding something right now that is made from oil. It is a fact that eventually we will run out of the gooey gold, but the real immediate concern is production. When major natural disasters occur in areas rich in oil or in areas that consume large amounts of oil (such as Japan), almost everything stops in terms of oil production/refinement and consumption. We are so dependent on oil that if we were to have an immediate  and immense enough shortage it would be all round chaos. Almost everything in our day to day lives would be greatly effected. Most things that we use today come from oil, with a major shortage all of these things would become much more expensive. Should we be so reliant on just one substance for so much in our lives?

What are we eating?

When you pick a piece of fruit up in your local supermarket can you figure out where it comes from? Probibly not, I know I can't. In most cases it is almost impossible to figure this out because in just one batch of produce the sources can vary by hundreds of kilometers. This also makes it incredibley dificult to pinpoint the single yield of one crop should it be infected. This situation gets even worse when you are dealing with liquid products such as milk. If there is a problem with one cow then you have a problem with every ounce of milk that the problem milk comes into contact with. These problems are growing, especially with mass production. Yet the public concern appears minimal.  What can we do to better monitor our food supply?