I like your style, David.

The Mustache.  That's ging to stick, I think.

Yeah, I think it may be better than "old airmiles", earned by his traveling over the world without ever learning anything.

First, I think it is hilarious that we on Grist have started calling him the Mustache. I just wonder. Has anyone told him about our nickname for him? Someone should. It is only fair. I nominate David Roberts for the chore. Now for real comments.

One thing that annoys me about the mustache is his use of the term "life style" as if America has one unitary life style, like back in the good old days of Leave it to Beaver (a white bread, family comedy of the 1950s for you young'uns). In reality there are dozens, maybe hundreds of life styles in the US, and all of them have their pluses and minuses when it comes to trashing the planet.

Another thing that causes me to wince is the mustache's almost child like worship of free market economics, circa the 1990s. I think the mustache is the last true Neo-Liberal, and he will probably be dated within a few years by his faithfulness to the Market God.

The mustache wants change, but I think he will only back change that prevents change. Real change that would take us off our current suicidal path, would challenge ideologies, interests, politics, and yes, life styles, that would send the mustache into apoplexy.

At the same time I do not judge people like the mustache by my standards, I judge them by the world they inhabit, and with that caveat I think the mustache has served a useful purpose. Let us remember to keep our own counsel at the same time.  

Randy Cunningham

Randy Cunningham

Say what you will. The Mustache knows how to write. Knows how to resonate with readers of the Mother Ship: The New York Times.

So if the Mustache starts pumping up the patriotic pulse with his new tag line: Green is the new Red White & Blue, we should follow his cue and embrace it. Never mind all his other politcal follies. The Mustache has been to Peru. He has seen the receding glaciers as clearly as some of us see our receding hairlines. He gets it. So don't knock the Resonant Writer at the NYT when he comes bearing gifts. Accept them with open arms and say, "Thank You Mr. Friedman."

I made a little list, which I might as well drop here.  It has to do with the efficiency of various shipping strategies.

A small farmer bringing vegetables to market in an old pickup truck might move a ton of goods 10 miles on a gallon of fuel.  If that.

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.

So, as a rational engineer I'm not going to make a blanket globalize or localize argument ... but I'm going to ask anyone who does to show me their numbers.

Where did you get those numbers from?

I wonder how those numbers shift for food that has to be refrigerated.  I suspect that local suddenly becomes a whole lot more important, from an energy point of view with fresh/perishable foods.  Never mind nutrition and taste.

But, yeah, grain and such should be grown where it makes ecological sense to do so and moved to market in bulk.

There's another aspect to the concept of local food that isn't often explicitly addressed: Many conventional foods, especially processed ones, make multiple trips from farm, to processing center, to factory, distribution center, and back to the consumer.  I have, no kidding, in California bought a bottle of crushed garlic that was grown in California, processed in Florida, and then shipped back to the store in California.  That's just dumb.  Buying local doesn't always have equal impact, depending on the food involved, but it is an effective means of boycotting the infrastructure that incorporates so much senseless extra shipping.

Thanks for the references.

The input:food calorie ratio for those chips is in fact shockingly low, almost certainly less than 1:1.  Of course, as you point out in the referenced thread, they are fried food in a bag of mostly air: in other words, a very energy dense material.

Michael Pollan has pointed out that our system of subsidized corn production has resulted in a situation in which the cheapest food calories are the most processed and least healthy.  I fear that the same may turn out to be true of food energy footprints: The least healthy (calorie rich, nutrient poor, high fat foods) foods, being the most energy dense, are the lowest footprint.  Certainly the input:food calorie ratio would be much worse for a conventionally-grown tomato than for a bag of these chips.

One component that the analysis omits is wastage: obviously not all of the bags of chips that get produced, get eaten.  Some go stale, some get crushed, etc.  Still, that factor probably isn't more than ~10%, so it wouldn't really change the story.

It would be fascinating to look at a table of these sorts of studies that address a variety of foods from many sources.  I'd be really curious to know how much embodied energy is present in a variety of staple foods (corn vs. potatoes vs. wheat, etc).  It would be interesting to see how the transportation/distribution component varies for, say, canned tomato sauce.

I also wonder how much of Walker's favorable figures are a result of their apparent interest in controlling their footprint.  A less-conscientious company might well use alot more carbon to produce an equivalent product. Or not.

The unfortunate thing is,

That last line is a stub of another piece of writing.  Please ignore.

I actually think that "faceless corporations" are ahead of the curve on squeezing energy costs out of their processes.  A penny saved is a penny earned.

And they have less motivation than "consumers" for conspicuous consumption.

I don't have the figures in front of me, but the cost of energy is much less than 5% of the cost of operation of an office building, so it's not much of a priority.  Manufacturing probably has a higher percentage, though.

So once the container ship hits port, then what? That ton of goods has to be moved further by at least one, if not several of the preceeding shipping methods. Honest accounting would follow the food from field to fork. And for most real foods, the shortest distance from field to fork is most efficient. Not to mention most delicious.

But ... if you aren't near a container port, might you be near a rail line?

Sure. And from the rail yard, the container is offloaded onto a semi-truck, which takes the container to a "centralized" warehouse. From there, the container is off-loaded with forklifts, then reloaded onto another truck, which then drives all over town delivering to every retail outlet.

This doesn't mention all the transport that has occurred beginning at the field. Trucked from field to processor/exporter. Maybe more trucks, trains, cargo ships in between.

You acknowledge my field to fork metaphor as simply metaphor, and then ignore its truth. Tell the whole story.

I get your field to fork metaphor, and agree with it.

But I don't assume without evidence that it must tip the way you think it does.

I mean, do YOU have field to for numbers?

Or are you simply assuming them first, and then assuming that they prove your point second?

(It is not true that trains would uniformly require further "pick-up truck" stages further than farmer's market.  Indeed, in the case of supermarkets, it is train and then 50+ ton-mile-per-gallon trucks making the delivery.)

My original statement was:

"So, as a rational engineer I'm not going to make a blanket globalize or localize argument ... but I'm going to ask anyone who does to show me their numbers."

I was being a bit bossy...

Yeah, you're right, I'm talking through my nose. I have no hard data. Simply well-informed intuition. Which is far from infallible. But often surprisingly accurate.

Your point about efficiency of transport method is well-taken. But it is only one factor in a complicated mosaic of options.

If we're talking about a stable (as in doesn't spoil) staple item that is not producible in the home region of the fork-wielder, I'll buy into some of what you're selling. For me in the northern Rockies, rice is probably a good example.

But I still believe that by and large, fresh, minimally processed, locally produced food is what is best for farmers, fork-wielders, and their communities.

That sounds sensible, especially if you can see the farms not too far distant.