Check out a new video on food miles from The Nation:
You can also check out the accompanying article here.
Mind your (fo)odometer 16
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Posted 4:54 PM on 3 Jul 2007
by Kate Sheppard -
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Kate Sheppard is Grist’s political reporter.
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JMG Posted 10:44 am
03 Jul 2007
Watching the video, what I thought was "Well, what's more important than food?" As in, is it better to reduce food miles or people miles?
I'm not arguing that food should travel necessarily, but I do think that it's possible that we obsess too much about it, meanwhile not looking at the travel by people and made goods.
I don't hear or see anyone campaigning against imported cars, SUVs, TVs, pressure washers, iMacs, iPods, iPhones or any other of the myriad consumer devices we insist on based on the distance these devices traveled to our homes. And all of those things could be made locally--- unlike food imported to the rich countries, not all of which could be grown locally in many places. In fact, food is probably much less portable than factories.
I wouldn't have any problem getting rid of all jet travel for food, especially if it meant a shift in attitudes among enviros toward jet travel, period.
So it's only two cheers for limiting food miles. Far more important is that we limit OUR miles traveled.
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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Bart Anderson Posted 11:13 pm
03 Jul 2007
I think food miles is worthwhile as a first approximation. A way to get us thinking about the subject.
One benefit is that you begin to become aware of local food, which means becoming aware of your area's climate and food traditions. My wife has found that it is a great way to get to know people, whether it's other gardeners or farmers.
Another way to think about food production that is not based on food-miles: The Bullseye Diet by Sharon Astyk.
One realization: vegetables and fruit are mostly water, so that in transporting them long distances, we're mostly transporting water.
Food miles have gotten a lot of publicity, but you are right that reducing transportation for other things is also important.
Thoughtful piece by an Australian involved in business education.
Think globally, manufacture locally
I've tried applying the bullseye model to personal transportation:
Adapting zones and sectors for the city
Bart
Energy Bulletin
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odograph Posted 12:50 am
04 Jul 2007
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JMG Posted 5:42 am
04 Jul 2007
Bart, Angelina Jolie and Summer Rayne Oakes are mostly water too, but oh what a difference the arrangement of the rest makes!
Same with fruits and vegetables. Someone (probably Tom P, maybe not) commented on another thread about the error we make in thinking that food is a simple combination of traits that we can engineer by procuring and mixing simpler substances together that possess those traits.
Sorry, I'm not joining this parade, obsessing about food miles while ignoring frequent flyer miles and all the energy spent making and sending cheap plastic crap, tourists, and raw materials around the world.
You happen to live in California, where (until global heating really kicks in soon) you are blessed with an abundance of fairly local produce in a fabulous variety year round. In many places, this isn't the case. California agriculture really took off when refrigerated train cars could reach New York in five days --- suddenly the rest of us could enjoy what Californians took for granted.
That's not a bad use of energy--if we got rid of the jets and the tractor-trailers and limited ourselves to shipping food on trains and barges, I think the energy investment is more than worth it.
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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Nucbuddy Posted 9:08 am
04 Jul 2007
It was indeed Tom Philpott, and neither he nor the party he referenced -- UC Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan -- made a good case for it. It was in a blogpost titled Edible Media: Gene blues.
Yet as Michael Pollan reported recently, the theory is unraveling in scientific circles. It turns out that human bodies require more than a bunch of isolates mixed together, dyed, and packaged. Nutrients work not alone, but within the context of whole foods. The vitamin C bound up in an orange gives us more than the equivalent amount of ascorbic-acid isolate; the latter can't replace the former in a healthy diet.
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Bart Anderson Posted 4:54 pm
04 Jul 2007
If you're saying that local food is not a personal interest of yours, I can understand that. But if you're trying to make a more general point, then I think more rigor is required. Most of the work I've read puts energy/GHGs from diet near the top of the list, near housing and transportation.
In terms of getting people excited about sustainability, local food is a winner. People have memories and deep feelings about food; it's more emotionally involving than photovoltaics and depletion curves.
I prefer emphasizing local food rather than counting food miles. That seems rather Puritanical - like counting calories.
Bart
Energy Bulletin
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JMG Posted 6:10 pm
04 Jul 2007
Though I will say that I do see the cost-benefit of energy spent on food as way more favorable than for transportation and housing, partly because food is so central emotionally and culturally.
But even more than that, it's because food is not the same as any other use of energy: food is, literally, vital. Pretty much all our other uses of energy are choices we make.
And, there's an irreducible minimum number of calories everyone should have, and whatever it takes to provide that is what it takes. Ideally everyone can meet their caloric and nutritional minimums (or slightly more) with minimally processed (and, therefore, by definition mainly local) foods as much as possible.
But there's no irreducible minimum household energy consumption; good houses can produce more energy than the consume across much of America, and they can at least break even almost anywhere. Similarly, there's no minimum that we have to spend moving ourselves around via fossil fuels, particularly by air. Americans fly and drive all over the place because they feel entitled to do so, but that can change tomorrow.
I guess if I were to sum it up, I would say that the local food movement -- a desire to eat lower on the food chain, and to eat real, unprocessed food --- is enough of a justification by itself.
A good stiff carbon tax would, I think, handle my issues --- people would have a strong incentive to prefer the local and the less processed in food, but they would also be getting strong signals to change the other pieces, where more savings is available.
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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JMG Posted 6:13 pm
04 Jul 2007
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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odograph Posted 10:30 pm
04 Jul 2007
The "200 miles good rule" is offered as a reduction of a lot of math. The math might be simple but the numbers are hard to come by ... is this Apple efficient or inefficient? With lack of labeling a local preference may seem logical.
Picture the local farmer, and every visitor to a regional farmer's market fueling up for the drive, and then remember the old table:
# One gallon of fuel moves a ton of goods 59 miles by tractor-trailer.
# One gallon of fuel moves a ton of goods 202 miles by rail.
# One gallon of fuel moves a ton of goods 515 miles by inland barge.
# One gallon of fuel moves a ton of goods 1,043 miles by container ship.
JMG mentioned mail above ... if we could do the strict accounting, a rail-shipped avocado might well be more energy efficient than a local peach.
So is the rule justified? At first it might seem a useful bias ... but then I start to think ... what if we had more people going to farmer's markets? How many miles would they drive past their local market to get there? How many more farmers in inefficient pickups or vans would get into the act?
How much worse off would we be?
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odograph Posted 10:32 pm
04 Jul 2007
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Biodiversivist Posted 12:00 pm
08 Jul 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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JMG Posted 1:16 pm
08 Jul 2007
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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SustainableGreen Posted 1:31 pm
08 Jul 2007
I was hoping more simple varied actions such as CSA or "growing your own" would be pushed for the Live Earth event. This and many other improvements in our lifestyle could have been promoted, instead of 'changing to CFLs' and 'using bioDiesel in the tour bus, dude' over and over.
Better organization and communication would help.
David
Sustainability For Life
Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!
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GreyFlcn Posted 2:44 pm
08 Jul 2007
So Organic is probably more important than Food Miles.
However EVEN MORE important than EITHER is "Deforestation Food".
At the very least you can know with buying (relatively) local that none of that is going on.
http://www.rsesymposia.org/hbmore.php?catid=52&pcatid ...
"Anyone who lives here knows that the first year you clear land, slash-and-burn and put some cows on the land," he said. "The second year you pull out stumps and plant rice. Soy is only planted the third year - after the ban loses effect." He added: "Everyone could accept the moratorium today without changing anything ... We expected more."
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/62/2 ...
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kmp Posted 1:11 am
09 Jul 2007
I was interested to learn from the video that more energy is used in producing food than in processing and shipping it. I guess this should be obvious, as it takes a while to grow corn and raise up a cow or steer, but I sometimes forget how petroleum-intensive conventional agriculture is.
While I agree we should not become victims of "food mile hysteria" (I eat as local as possible but still buy coffee, rice, olive oil and chocolate) I don't think that's much of a worry. Most people have no idea how far their food travels and people are almost always fascinated and somewhat alarmed when I drop the "1500 miles" statistic in conversation (yes, I'm the life of the party). We all know that there are great reasons for eating local, including knowing your farmer, eating fresher food, and fewer miles traveled... but one that has not been discussed is that my food dollar stays in my neighborhood. I'm lucky enough to have an organic farm 12 miles from my door, from which I pick up a CSA of fresh veggies and wildflowers once a week. Yes, I drive past the supermarket (3 miles away) to get there but it is worth it to me to eat fresher, tastier food and to be keeping a local farmer farming (and paying her mortgage) and some local farmhands in a job.
Also, I don't disagree that there is a lot of plastic crap that is manufactured and flown about in this world; however I would not place iPods, computers or cars on that list. After all, these are extremely useful items that require specialized manufacturing and are probably best made in a centralized location and shipped. Granted, it would be nice if that location were in the US, but given that food is eaten by everyone, every day (some of us several times a day!) and electronics and cars are speciality purchases that will last for years, I don't see the logical comparison in the "miles traveled" debate.
Kaela
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caniscandida Posted 5:56 am
09 Jul 2007
To Kaela:
Good heavens! You were gone too long! How great to have you back!
And by coincidence, Willa too has just reemerged, on the Dr. Bronner soap thread.
Good point about how we generally do not give any thought to the distance our food has had to travel to reach us. Do you think it would be too much to ask for this?: Our food should be marked with an indication of where it was grown -- or where its various ingredients were respectively grown -- , where it was got ready for shipment, and how many "food miles," roughtly, it traveled. Providing that information does not strike me as nearly so difficult a task as providing the nutritional information of a food, which is now standard.
It should be obvious that we deserve as much information about our food as we want. And then, of course, how we decide to use that information is up to us.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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