Voltaire.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

I'd like a nice fat carbon tax.  That would price up inefficient products (be they local or not) and allow the efficiency winners (be they local or not) to stand out.

Without that, consumer preference for local food should be an improvement ... but what do you actually do in some place like SoCal sprawl?

Do you spurn the supermarket (with its unlabeled mix of local and distance foods), and and travel further to a "farmer's" market?  When you get there do you quiz vendors on whether they are jobbers or growers, and the MPG of their van?

A middle ground might be to stick to the local market, but to avoid "obviously distant" foods, especially when they are treats rather than nutrition.  Is there a movement for that?

In 1976 I enrolled in ag school at the U of IL at Champaign/Urbana.  On my application form for grad school I made the mistake of expressing interest in organic agriculture.  The very first day in my vegetable crops production class, I, full of enthusiam, asked the professor about trucking vegetables 1000 miles vs. producing  locally.  Recall that this was shortly after the oil shortages and price spikes resulting from the OPEC embargos.  At that time profs in such conservative ag colleges weren't used to hearing such questions but he was prepared for the organic boy.  Evidently, my application had been discussed among the profs.  
He asked me, "Are you Mr. ***?"  Set back, I said, "Yes."  And then he answered, "Why don't you go ask Ralph Nader?"  

So, Tom, for some of us older green weenies, the Backlash started a long time ago.  Most folks are quit happy not to have a skunk thrown into their "progress" party.  Questions such as these just get a lot of folks' backs against the wall and they will react to defend their concept of progress, particularly when they have vested interests in said progress.  The problem is that with many of our  alternative visions and proposals, we just don't have a lot of alternatives materially or conceptually available to offer and give people a real choice.  Isn't this one of our biggest predicaments?  We can't tear down without first building up.  But we do need to start by weaning the old ways and moving the new to the front teat.  There will be some squealing among teat mates in the process and some concealment or confusion of identity among potential front teat mates.  This is where the vision thing comes in to help weed out the imposters and usurpers.  This going to be a big long struggle over who gets to set the dominant vision of the future.  As we have seen, many currently on the front teat are usurping by cloaking the old with a very thin coating of green so we have to remain vigilant and not be fearful of backlash, squealing, biting and kicking.    

But this one might be REAL!

It is time for sweeping legislation designed to internalize all costs of manufacture and distribution. This would include charging a fee for emitting CO2. I used the word "fee" because Republicans seem to like fees better than taxes. For example, they like user fees for various public services because, in their opinion, only the immediate and direct beneficiary of a service should have to pay for it. Well, manufacturers and distibutors should have to pay for the opportunity to destroy our natural environment. They can decide whether to stop releasing the chemicals, reduce their profit margin, or pass the cost on to the consumer. Then let the market decide whether the service or product is really more valuable than having a planet to live on. Faced with the true cost of services and products, I believe consumers will choose having a planet to live on.

I would like to see a few of the top Grist monkies address this issue as it relates to their areas of interest and expertise. What are the implications of internalizing costs when it comes to food, agriculture in general, different forms of alternative energy, transportation, housing, et cetera? Could it actually solve any major environmental problems? Are there any acceptions? Are there services and products that this should not apply to?

Then we can look at the price of an item when we are trying to decide whether to buy it rather than wondering... how many miles it traveled, were the workers paid a decent wage, did extraction of resources lead to harvesting of bush meat, does it contribute to global warming...

It seems environmentalists are currently fighting a large number of small battles, gaining ground here, losing ground there. They never occupy and secure an area for long, but run off in another direction... nibbling away at problems caused by greed and ignorance. Legislation designed designed to internalize all costs of manufacture and distribution could be the atomic weapon that allows them to seize the high ground and bring their opponents to the negotiating table.

Forward!

exceptions, not acceptions

Darn typos!

Unless we are discussing whether this is acceptable... any acceptions?

Forward!

To me, the food-miles notion is almost the relevant measure, but not quite, because, as we're all discussing, different supply chains are more or less energy efficient. Therefore, it seems to make much more sense to measure CO2 emissions per unit of food, or usage of fossil fuels, or what-have-you. Isn't that more precisely the question?

Perhaps: Grams CO2 / Calorie?

That the DOE was able to produce such interesting reports before it existed ...

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

I've done calculations for food miles for Maine, using USDA's average per capita food consumption data.  Using the closest logical supply points, average miles are 1805.  However, these estimates are based on two assumptions which can't hold for any location in the country.  First, they assume the food system supplies ingredients from the closest potential supply point, rather than the lowest cost supplier.  Second, the USDA per capita consumption data is based on what I would call primary ingredients like oils and sugars and flours, and even frozen fruits and vegetables, rather than the pre-packaged and ready-to-heat or eat meals that make up a large part of the current American diet.  Just getting soybeans from the field to a processing plant that makes it into oil that is then shipped to another processing plant where it is used as an ingredient adds much complexity.  A very few studies (most of the ones I've seen are from Europe) try to put together the ingredients for even a single product, and the mileage always far exceeds the miles from the processing plant to the consumer.

So the logical answer to the food miles question may be a simple one--far too many!

The problem with "average food miles" is that it makes absolutely no sense, since some food is purchased locally or in-state, and some comes from the other side of the world - like the nice melamine additive courtesy of China.  You can go to a market and hold a pear from Australia on one hand and a strawberry grown down the road in the next town ... why average them together?  

Then you'll go crazy because the buyers for wholesale goods purchase on the spot market.  So if you want the same product, let's say macaroni, and you saved a dime by shopping from California instead of Newark, you'd do that even if you were located in Manhattan.  During production of that macaroni, it might have been grown in Nebraska as wheat, manufactured in Chicago, cheesed in Wisconsin, and packaged in California.  Sold to the bidder in New York City!

The post lends itself to the Utopian dream that in a perfect world, all your food would be grown right in your own community.  It sounds so sustainable and good, with an average food-miles of maybe 100.  But in today's multi-modal transportation network, it's just a guess.  I do tend to agree that in many cases, such as origination-destination studies, edible food commodities do appear to "go the wrong way" before being delivered to the final market.  

Try commodity flow models, USDA edible, dairy, seafood, perishable, and bulk foods, and origination-destination studies.  The Volpe Transportation Library and BTS might be a good start.  /sammie

Onward through the fog

Thanks for your original column on this, Tom.

I'll add a bit more background to the origins of the 1500 mile stat. In Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket (Norton, 2004), I say, "Statistics from several wholesale markets in the United States show that fruits and vegetables are traveling between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometers [roughly 1500 to 2500 miles] from farm to market, an increase of roughly 20 percent in the last two decades."

I cite Rich Pirog's "Food, Fuel and Freeways," as well as a similar analysis for the Mid-Atlantic food system that found food items traveling a very similar distance. In addition, I did my own analysis of what data I could find on how far a loaf of bread, a pound of ground beef, a carton of  orange juice and other typical food items traveled, and they also fell largely in the 1500 to 2500 mile range.

In subsequent promotion of Eat Here and interviews on the local food movement, I used "at least 1500 miles" as a short-hand.

The bottom line is that the ecological, social, economic and security benefits of local food remain regardless of whether the average food item in the American diet travels 1000, 1300 or 1500 miles.

Brian Halweil, Worldwatch Institute

Lovely, BioD!  Ain't English just the greatest!

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!