About a year ago, The Economist ran a big article purporting to show that eating locally is actually worse for the environment than typical supermarket fare. I debunked the article here.
About six months later, the NYT op-ed page ran a piece making similar arguments. And I responded again.
In both of these pieces, the authors discovered that in a built environment rigged to grow food in mass quantities, process it in huge factories, and haul it over vast distances, there are cases in which industrial food that travels 1500 miles uses less energy than organic fare consumed nearby.
My response is, fair enough: but we've systematically dismantled the infrastructure required to make local food energy efficient, and invested billions of dollars in the industrial-food system. If we're interested in an energy-efficient food system, let's reinvest in local slaughterhouses, canneries, train systems, distribution points, retail outlets, etc., etc.
Now NY Times reporter Andrew Martin has come up with a think-piece trotting out the same arguments. Here's what his piece boils down to:
Don't drive your sport utility vehicle to the farmers' market, buy one food item and drive home again.
Agreed. I won't.
Comments
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Ekirky Posted 3:20 am
11 Dec 2007
I'll say it again.
We need to make emitting CO2 expensive.
Getting food to our tables is complicated. There are many, many factors. We can't be expected to sit down and do out the calculations to figure out the carbon footprint of each tomato. If carbon dioxide emissions were expensive...the free market would do the calculations for us. The energy intensity of each food item would show up in the price. And everyone ( not just benevloent greens) would care.
This is exactly the type of complicated problem (maximizing benefits while minimizing costs) that the free market is designed to solve.
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odograph Posted 3:35 am
11 Dec 2007
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odograph Posted 3:51 am
11 Dec 2007
But ... I'm with Ekirky. Tax the carbon and let it all sort itself out.
(Food miles discussions are ultimately a battle of "missing data." No one knows the median distance customers drive to farmer's markets. No one knows the median distance farmers drive to markets. No one knows the median energy inputs for their operations. Pessimists like me can assume that there are enough "stinkers" in those numbers to throw the whole plan off ... but I suppose optimists might just assume that there are not.)
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BernardBrown Posted 7:51 am
11 Dec 2007
I also liked the point about eating lower on the food chain.
Change the world one lunch at a time. Find out how at www.pbjcampaign.org
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Tom Philpott Posted 8:26 am
11 Dec 2007
So does that make shopping at the farmers market less "green" than shopping at Wal-Mart, where the semis come in tightly packed over highways maintained with billions in taxpayer cash every year? Maybe.
On the other hand, we could divert some of that highway cash, now acting as a hidden subsidy to the long-haul food market, to rebuilding local food infrastructure. Say all the farmers in a certain area shared an energy efficient truck that would go around and collect everyone's produce and take it to market. Would that not rule?
And so so on.
Victual Reality
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Sam Wells Posted 8:34 am
11 Dec 2007
Of course, the truck might being going trans-continental and the pickup only 50 miles ... the NYT article seemed a little trivial and frivolous to me.
What I like about locally produced food is that is isn't a huge manufacturing operation that has all kinds of ancillary and secondary sources of energy consumption - such as cold storage sheds, huge warehouses, forklifts and terminal tractors, and so forth. You pick the goodies and take them warm to market in a small farm truck. If stuff needs chilling, you buy a few bags of ice, no big deal.
The big news I've been reading is that electric cars don't have much reductions if you're getting your recharging power from a dirty old coal fired generating station. That was a shocker!
Onward through the fog
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JeffB Posted 2:20 pm
11 Dec 2007
Well, first the wife does the shopping, often with two teen agers in tow. So when she get's home, I peer into the grocery bag and start reading the really fine print about where the food comes from. Washington state is best. Oregon slightly less so. California less than that.
I've got all them trained to at least think a little about what they are buying. We've still got a little bit of trouble with boxed snack crackers and snack bars...a lot of packaging for the sake of convenience in my opinion. (My wife's taken to hiding these in her car...kind of like what an alcoholic does with his bottle.)
Getting to the point though, I get home one day this week and found that we have eight of those small yogurt containers in the refrigerator. I read the fine print. Oops...California. Time to quiz the wife and kids.
"Why did you buy yogurt from California? We should be able to get yogurt from Oregon at least..."
"I don't like the type of fruit that they have on the bottom."
Hmmm.... To me, fruit is, well, fruit. Does it really matter to are overall quality of life if a California yogurt has just a little bit better fruit than an Oregon yogurt?
And this is why we need the carbon tax...even those of us who know better can't make the right decisions when it may mean even the slightest of compromises. We need a signal that tells us we're making the wrong choice. So that is why we need the carbon tax, it is the best way to engage Adam Smith's "invisible hand" to create the market mechanisms for making the right choices.
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edmharris Posted 9:49 pm
11 Dec 2007
Interesting debate here around the carbon-intensiveness of local/conventional food shopping - the point about loss of local infrastructure is a good one. However - I think another important point is being missed - the environment is not the only thing impacted by our food choices. The social impacts of supermarket vs. local food shopping are very different, and should not be excluded from our analysis. Check out Worldchanging today.
I've also written more about this here.
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amc89 Posted 1:42 am
12 Dec 2007
I buy local for a number of reasons than just reducing food miles and carbon output (which I agree are important, but just not the only factor). I like the idea of local produce farms in the area flourishing and I think keeping our farms alive makes a community more pleasant. I like that the people at the farmer's market recognize me and chat with me. The food also tastes a lot better and is healthier.
Another important reason is animal welfare. I don't eat animal products myself, but for those that do, buying local animal products usually contributes to better animal welfare, since it means not buying from a factory farm, where animals are kept in tiny cages, given antibiotics and hormones, and transported long distances, often under horrific conditions to slaughterhouses.
Tom, you'll be happy to know I biked to the farmer's market this summer and fall.
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