I wouldnt be completely surprised if it were true, though I lack the background and willpower to try to get an actual answer lol.
My thought process is that food also implies some level of driving (delivering pesticides/fertilizer, driving crops away), the fertilizers are fossil-fuel derived, and if you count the sun it takes to grow crops to eat (or worse, as feed for meat).
The whole chain is pretty inefficient, too. Crops are pretty good at converting sunlight to stored energy, but animals and us are bad at retrieving that stored energy. The losses compound if we're eating meat.
Walking isn't a particularly efficient method of movement either, to my understanding.
The energy gets a bit spurious though. One could argue that if we're going to count sunlight going into the crops, we should do the same for the sunlight that raised the dinos so they could become oil.
I also would wager that starts and stops would impact this heavily. The human weighs a lot less so they can accelerate/decelerate much cheaper. The car would have a better edge on a long, straight mile with no stops.
A human walking is absurdly efficient, as anyone who's ever tried to outrun a bad diet can tell you. Running or walking a mile burns ~100 extra calories relative to sitting on your couch. Unless you're putting active effort into not doing so, most diets fluctuate by far more than that.
Even if we count the cost of the co2 emissions: it probably takes more petroleum products to grow the food for the walking delivery workers than it takes to fuel the delivery truck.
My thought process is that food also implies some level of driving (delivering pesticides/fertilizer, driving crops away), the fertilizers are fossil-fuel derived, and if you count the sun it takes to grow crops to eat (or worse, as feed for meat).
The whole chain is pretty inefficient, too. Crops are pretty good at converting sunlight to stored energy, but animals and us are bad at retrieving that stored energy. The losses compound if we're eating meat.
Walking isn't a particularly efficient method of movement either, to my understanding.
The energy gets a bit spurious though. One could argue that if we're going to count sunlight going into the crops, we should do the same for the sunlight that raised the dinos so they could become oil.
I also would wager that starts and stops would impact this heavily. The human weighs a lot less so they can accelerate/decelerate much cheaper. The car would have a better edge on a long, straight mile with no stops.