Over in London, Mayor Ken Livingstone is putting that idea into action. As the Guardian reports, Livingstone recently declared that "The energy and emissions involved in producing food account for 22% of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions."
Ponder that number for a minute. Rather than obsess about hybrids and switchgrass and CAFE standards -- worthy topics, to be sure -- it might make sense to push for policies that make food production more eco-friendly. And Livingstone is doing just that.
"I want London to set a standard for other cities around the world to follow in reducing its own contribution to climate change. How we deal with food will play an important role in this," he told the Guardian.
(Thanks to the Organic Consumers Association for bringing this story, which came out way back on Jan. 7, to my attention.)
According to the Guardian, Livingstone's plans include:
- Cutting food miles with the help of "prohibitively high" charges for polluting lorries. By 2008 he hopes to introduce a low emission zone in London with very high charges for vehicles producing high greenhouse gas emissions, and punitive fines for those failing to pay;
- Encouraging schools and hospitals to buy more local and organic food. Five London NHS hospitals are experimenting with sustainable procurement. "The power of public procurement will be used to transform food markets and drive sustainability," he said;
- Using planning policies to end food deserts in poor areas, such as Hackney, where there are whole wards "where you cannot buy a single piece of fresh food". Death rates from heart disease are twice as high in the east end of London as in the west. Improving food access was vital to tackling "health inequalities", he added.
By taxing long-haul trucks "prohibitively," the plan will give a competitive price advantage to small farms near London, which move their goods into the city in smaller vehicles. As the market for locally grown food grows, farms will likely cooperate on deliveries, making local food even more energy efficient. And like the folks over in Woodbury County, Iowa, Livingstone is using government food-buying power, long yet another subsidy to industrial food, as a way to boost local producers.
Lest the plan sound like left-wing madness from a man known, not always affectionately, as "Red Ken," a politician from the Conservative Party weighed in supportively. Here is the Guardian again:
Conservative leader David Cameron chose the organic farmers' conference in London to declare himself in favour of organic production, and to identify himself with consumers' concerns over GM foods and diet.
He added sustainable food and farming to his blitz on key policy areas in speeches this week. Establishing his credentials by saying he had won prizes for his home-grown organic vegetables in his local village competition this year, Mr. Cameron went on to identify with consumers' worries about "what we eat, how it's grown and what it does to our children".
He also promised that his party would look at food in a "holistic way", rather than thinking about farming, health and the environment in separate boxes as in the past.
My God, where do they get right-wingers like that?
That the food in London no longer sucks has nearly become a cliche. Now the city is establishing itself as a pioneer in the local-food movement.
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Comments View as Flat
biopolitical Posted 1:34 am
25 Feb 2006
My take
David Cameron should instead be reassuring consumers that GM foods are perfectly healthy and that food these days is the safest and cheapest ever. Although perhaps not for long. More here.
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Biodiversivist Posted 2:57 am
26 Feb 2006
The mayor may be overstepping his bounds
It makes for a reasonable hypothesis that because the poor eat different foods from the rich that those foods might explain their worse health, or possibly, their low pay, or possibly, their higher domestic violence rates. A book called The Status Syndrome : How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity undertook a detailed statistical analysis of the health disparity in the UK. Unexpectedly, they found no correlation between the food the poor ate and their health. In other words, wealthy people who ate similar foods to the poor (and vice versa) still had better health. The only thing they could correlate to poor health was low status, suggesting that things are much more complex (as usual) that what we assume. The mayor of London may have better health because his quarter of a million-dollar salary brings him high status.
Why are fresh fruits and vegetables scarce in poor parts of London? My hypothesis is that the poor choose not to buy them therefore merchants don't bother to stock them. Logically, increasing the price of such products won't motivate them to buy more. I happen to rub shoulders with a number of poor people, some don't' touch vegetables, some do. They eat fast foods because they prefer them, not out of ignorance or a lack of access to fruits and vegetables. Fast foods bring pleasure to hard lives where pleasure is hard to come by. Those poor people I know who do try to eat healthy food are very much concerned about the cost of fruits and vegetables.
The mayor of London is about to do a social experiment without using the scientific method, no control groups, no long-term statistical analysis. Will the health of poor Londoners improve as a result of his coercive policies or will they simply pay more for the few vegetables they do buy (possibly buying even fewer), and have to drive farther to obtain the foods they prefer? Typical of almost all such social experiments, no control groups or studies will ever be done to verify the effects of the experiment.
Here in the US, traffic accidents have increased in the last twenty years, yet fatalities have gone down, suggesting that to further reduce fatalities, we need to increase the number of accidents. I assume that increased seat belt use is the real reason, but personally, I would not want to be part of the control group needed to verify my assumption.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Help acquire and protect ecological hotspots, give to a conservation organization: www.saveourbiodiversity.com
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jdhlax Posted 4:51 am
26 Feb 2006
Reducing Environmental Harms
Biod, the point of Tom's post was that "our food system amounts to an ongoing environmental disaster," and that the mayor of London was attempting to do something about it. Because of your strong libetarian ethic, you chose to concentrate on a relatively minor aspect of the program, but promoting locally produced organic food in order to reduce the destruction caused by pesticides and oil consumption/burning is the main thrust of the program.
Re the relative health of poor people, I think it's been conclusively shown that their poor health is mainly due to the stress that being poor causes. However, it's ludicrous to imply, as you have, even if unintentionally, that all else being equal, people who eat healthier food won't be healthier.
Re access to fruits and vegetables in the slums: When I lived in the slums in Oakland, CA, there was no place to buy fresh fruit or vegetables. You are correct that many people living there didn't care about this, but many of us did. No one ever polled the people who live there to determine what they wanted. When those of us who wanted access to healthy food tried to get the city to encourage the opening of places that sell fruits and vegetables, we were told that many companies wouldn't open stores in our neighborhood because of the crime rate. We were never told that no one wanted fruits and vegetables in our neighborhoods.
Jeff Hoffman
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Biodiversivist Posted 3:19 pm
26 Feb 2006
I also agree with Tom's major point
"...our food system amounts to an ongoing environmental disaster." So, instead, I critiqued the mayor of London (who draws down $250,000 a year, has been a food critic for several magazines, and is about to get a big time out for some remarks he recently made) for suggesting he can impart a meaningful improvement in the health of London's poor by simply improving their access to locally grown produce.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Help acquire and protect ecological hotspots, give to a conservation organization: www.saveourbiodiversity.com
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Tom Philpott Posted 3:52 am
27 Feb 2006
Yo Biod,
I think it's relevant to ask how desire and preferences are constructed.
In the late 1990s I lived in a beautiful working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn called Crown Heights. The area is mostly West Indian and African-American, with a relatively small concentration of Lubivich Jews, and a small but growing concentration of white pioneer types. (You may remember a series of horrible incidents in the late 1980s involving tension between Lubivichers and West Indians.) The housing stock is mostly brownstones, with horrible high-rise some projects thrown in (including one that sits atop the site for the old Brooklyn Dodgers home, Ebbots Field). There was a significant presence of drug dealers, particularly on some blocks (not mine). They generally kept a sort of tense peace on the blocks they controlled, since they didn't want to bring unnecessary trouble on their enterprises--interacting with cops being one cost of doing business for the trade. Most people were working class folk--city workers, etc.-- most of whom had bought their brownstones during the "fire" years of the '70s (when rents throughout "undesirable" sections of NYC were so low that landlords were torching their building to collect insurance, a trend from which alas, NYC's wonderful community garden program sprouted.)
At any rate, on the stoop of our brownstone apartment my girlfriend and I--with the landlords's blessing--kept a few pots of herbs (basil, oregano, parsley, etc.) After a few months we had befriended several neighbors, including a rambunctious crew of kids aged, say, 8-13, who were constantly playing on the sidewalks, jump-roping, playing chase, and generally proving Jane Jacobs' dictum that city streets are eminently safe places for kids, so long as there is vibrant street life and plenty of adult eyes on the street.
One lovely summer afternoon I was out picking some basil for dinner. A line Brooklyn brownstones sparkling in the sun against that perfect blue NY sky is a landscape that rivals many "natural" ones, in my view. The gaggle of kids was playing right in front of my stoop. "What are you doing?," the ring leader of the crew demanded to know. "I'm picking my dinner," I replied. "You're gonna eat that?" came the incredulous reply. Several disgusted "oohs" emanated from my audience; a consensus formed that "eating plants" is a vile idea.
The long and the short of it is that I convinced the ring leader to try a basil leaf, promising him "it makes your breath smell good." He like it; the other kids tried it and they liked it, too; and we all decided that "eating plants" wasn't such a bad idea, after all.
Now let's ponder this. These kids' grandparents (in some cases, parents) either hailed from the U.S. south or the West Indies; in either case, they were just one or two generations off the land. In that short time, the idea of where food came from had become so obfuscated, so replaced by visions of the supermarket and packaging and Twinkies and what have you, that they found the idea of "eating plants" exotic and undesirable. Alas, when they tried it, they liked it.
There's a stubborn liberal idea that poverty ennobles people. It's a lie. Poverty fucks people up. Bring "the poor" good food, and they might not want it. Old habits die hard. But it's a libertarian lie that those habits spring from nowhere, that they have no history, that there mere "preferences" which emerged from a vacuum.
If we're interested in creating a just and environmentally sustainable food system, one place to start might be school gardens and school lunch programs. Is there money for it? First of all, is there really money to keep using these massive outlays to buy health- and environmentally ruinous crap? Second of all, last time I checked, our president, who sometimes claims libertarian ideals, was busy burning through $2 trillion to set up a friendly and stable regime in Iraq, home of so much oil. So maybe there's not money, after all.
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kmp Posted 4:21 am
27 Feb 2006
Local is Cheap & Green
Why should poor Londoners have to pay more for the "few vegetables they do buy" under the mayor's proposal?
Local food is generally substantially less expensive than non-local food. All year long in Manhattan you can find red peppers from Holland - generally they cost between $4.99 - $6.99/lb. In season, however, you can buy red peppers from Long Island for about $1.99/lb.
Perhaps the poor are choosing junk/fast food over fresh fruits and vegetables because fast food has become cheaper than fresh food. Perhaps, given the choice of fresh, local fruits and vegetables at a reasonable price, many people would choose to include more of these foods in their diet. Regardless I don't think the mayor is claiming that he will solve all of the poor's health problems with his proposal, however, it seems difficult to me to find issue with food that is fresher, less expensive and less damaging to the environment.
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Biodiversivist Posted 6:51 am
27 Feb 2006
Hey Tom,
Jeff calls me a libertarian all the time. He also calls Dave a libertarian on occasion. In fact, he tends to call anyone he disagrees with a libertarian.
There is a difference between poor people, and young people who temporarily live in a poor neighborhood because of the cheap rent. Most environmentalists who spend time on Internet forums are not poor people, and never have been. They really have no idea.
Since everyone is using some personal experience to emphasize their points of view, I may as well also. I lived in a garage with no plumbing with four other siblings until I was five. We had a pump in the front yard and an outhouse in the back. My oldest sister lived there to the age of ten. We eventually moved from there to a poor working class neighborhood, where I lived until I was eighteen. A single road separated the poor white neighborhood from the poor black one. Typical of any slum, many of my childhood friends were murdered or went to prison, including one of my brothers. Some members of my family are on welfare to this day. I know what it took to escape the poverty trap, and I understand why so few manage to do it.
The poor people I alluded to in my other post are my brothers and sisters. Unlike myself, and my wife and children, my siblings have little interest in fresh produce, and unlike the example you gave, their preferences are not the result of simple ignorance. My brothers and sisters prefer meat and starches, knowing full well that they are not as healthy as fruits and vegetables. Lowering the price, increasing the variety and availability would have no impact on their eating habits. They have hard lives, with low paying, low status, mind-numbing jobs. They count on food for much of their pleasure in life. Ultimately, it will be a tradeoff for the shorter life spans they will probably have. My mother on the other hand is your stereotypical nutrition fanatic. Although she lives in government housing two blocks from a Whole Foods grocery store, she doesn't shop there because she only gets $50 a month in food stamps. Poverty sucks, and I know it.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Help acquire and protect ecological hotspots, give to a conservation organization: www.saveourbiodiversity.com
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WAL Posted 11:10 pm
27 Feb 2006
Everyone's right
I think that Tom and BioD are both making valid points. I'm sure there will be people who will jump at the chance to buy relatively cheap, locally grown produce, given the opportunity. I'm also sure there are people who will want to have nothing to do with fresh veggies. Different people simply enjoy different foods. However, nowhere in the description of this proposed plan did I see anything about diminishing the availability of cheap, overprocessed, unhealthy food. Mayor Livingstone is simply providing an additional option to those people who are looking for fresh produce. Perhaps his scheme will drive up the cost of fast food, but I have to think that major fast food operations, and mainstream snack producers will not take all that large a hit.
At the end of the day I think food choice is all about personal preference. And people should have the option to obtain the food that they prefer.
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jdhlax Posted 3:16 am
28 Feb 2006
Libertarianism
Libertarianism is a philosophy that individual rights trump those of society and the environment. When Biod or anyone else makes statements that evince that philosophy, which is very anti-environmental and which I abhor, I will call them it. However, I do not call people libertarians merely because I disagree with them. Biod's guiding philosophy seems to be an contradictory mix of libertarianism and wilderness/wildlife advocacy, the latter of which is my priority. This is like a contrast between The Wilderness Society (Biod) and Earth First! (me).
Re the "difference between poor people, and young people who temporarily live in a poor neighborhood because of the cheap rent":
If young people are living there because the rent is cheap, they're also poor by definition. There is a difference between young people who are temporarily poor and those who will never escape the slums, and between people who wish they weren't poor and people who don't care about acquiring material wealth (artists, musicians, radicals, etc.) but why differentiate? If one lacks money to buy expensive food, it is irrelevant why or for how long that person is poor for the purpose of determining why there is no fresh produce available in the slums. And BTW, when I lived in west Oakland, the people with whom I tried to organize to get fresh produce sold in our area were long time neighborhood residents.
Jeff Hoffman
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Biodiversivist Posted 3:56 am
28 Feb 2006
Good points Jeff
Just go easy on the libertarian label.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Help acquire and protect ecological hotspots, give to a conservation organization: www.saveourbiodiversity.com
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