Food Miles
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1553456/Greener-by-miles.html
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/>
[]
Greener by miles
The Daily Telegraph
March 3, 2007
[]
Food miles: The produce we buy in supermarkets has often travelled half
way around the world
Conscientious consumers are being urged to buy locally sourced food in
the battle against climate change. But, as Richard Gray discovers, produce
from the other side of the world can actually have a smaller carbon footprint
Take a look in the average supermarket trolley and the food there will
probably have travelled farther than most people clock up in a decade. A
selection of just 26 items can have covered a total of 150,000 miles before
reaching the British kitchen.
With beef from Brazil,
beans from Kenya, apples
from New Zealand, chicken from Thailand
and strawberries from Spain,
shoppers can enjoy year-round produce. But with such astonishing "food
miles" being accumulated, it is little surprise that their environmental
impact is coming under scrutiny and sparking a backlash.
Already, the major supermarkets are crawling over each other to highlight
their "locally sourced" produce, while Marks and Spencer has begun labelling air-freighted products with logos of aircraft.
Yet some startling research is emerging that shows food miles might not be as
bad as consumers have been led to believe.
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Analysis of the industry reveals that for many foods, imported products
are responsible for lower carbon dioxide emissions than the same foodstuffs
produced in Britain.
Even products shipped from the other side of the world emit fewer greenhouse
gases than British equivalents.
The reasons are manifold. Sometimes it is because they require less fertiliser; sometimes, as with greenhouse crops, less
energy; sometimes, as with much African produce, the farmers use little mechanised equipment. The findings are surprising
environmental campaigners, who have, until now, used the distance travelled
by food as the measure of how polluting it is.
One study by Lincoln University, in New
Zealand, found that 2,849kg of carbon dioxide is
produced for every tonne of lamb raised in Britain, while just 688kg of the gas is
released with imported New Zealand
lamb, even after it has travelled the 11,000 miles to Britain.
Researchers and farmers in Britain
have raised doubts over the accuracy of the New
Zealand figures, but they concede that sheep farming in
New Zealand
is more efficient than in our own country.
"They have slightly better weather," said Prof Gareth
Edwards-Jones, from the department of agriculture at Bangor
University, in Wales.
"This means their grass can grow for longer and they don't have to give
their sheep as much feed as they do in the UK.
"With meat in the UK,
there is also a supermarket issue. Each of the supermarkets runs its own
abattoir, so if you sell your lamb to Tesco, you have to send your lamb to
Tesco's abattoir, even if you pass several local abattoirs on the way. As a
result, the meat picks up a huge amount of 'in-Britain' food miles from farm
to abattoir then to packaging before it gets to its final destination.
"If we could sort it out so that meat was slaughtered and packaged
locally, it could make the whole process far more efficient."
On the extensive rolling fields of Pigeon Hills sheep farm, 40 miles from
Nelson on New Zealand's South Island, the lush grassland needs little fertiliser to provide food for the livestock. Farmer
David McGaveston, 55, rears more than 10,000 sheep
and 500 beef cattle for export to the UK.
The style of farming in New Zealand
is considered to be less intensive than in Britain because of the large
areas of land. Mr McGaveston
uses small amounts of hay to help supplement his sheep through the cold
winter months and sends his lambs to be slaughtered and packaged at a plant
just 40 miles away. Most of the electricity used is also supplied from a
hydroelectric plant, which has minimal carbon dioxide emissions.
He said: "I understand the debate that is going on over food miles
in the UK
at the moment, but if we really are producing meat with less carbon dioxide
then that is surely a good thing."
[]
British apples are better for the environment during autumn and winter,
but not in spring and summer
Figures from the Lincoln University study also revealed that both dairy
products and apples imported from New Zealand had less of an impact on the
environment than those produced in Britain.
Prof Caroline Saunders, who led the research, said: "Food miles are
a very simplistic concept, but it is misleading as it does not consider the
total energy use, especially in the production of the product."
But other studies of fruit and vegetable production have revealed a more
complex picture. Research by the centre for environmental strategy at Surrey
University has shown that British apples are better for the environment
during autumn and winter, but in spring and summer it is "greener"
Dr Llorenç Milà I
Canals, of Surrey University, said: "By May, apples harvested in Britain
have been kept in refrigerated storage for more than six months, which uses a
lot of energy. At that point, it becomes better to import from New Zealand."
He has also found similar results for the production of lettuces, which
showed that the energy used to produce out-of-season lettuces in winter in Britain was greater than importing lettuces from
Spain.
He added: "If you are producing lettuce in a heated glasshouse in the UK, the
amount of energy you are using is huge, so in that case buying British
produce over winter is a bad idea."
Similarly, British farmers who grow tomatoes and strawberries often rely
on heated greenhouses to produce crops outside the short fruit season in Britain. Dr
Adrian Williams, an agriculture expert from Cranfield University, in Bedfordshire, said:
"If you produce something in an unheated greenhouse abroad or in a field,
you make a considerable saving, as you are not having
to use large amounts of energy heating a greenhouse. You could expect there
to be a difference even if you allow for the transport from Spain."
Earlier this year, Mr Williams revealed that
growing roses in Kenya
produces just 17 per cent as much carbon dioxide as growing them in Holland. Importing
beans by air from Uganda
or Kenya
is also more efficient.
Prof Edwards-Jones explained why: "In Uganda, they tend to have small
farms that export beans. They don't use tractors, as it is all done by hand, they use cow muck instead of fertiliser
and don't use hi-tech irrigation systems."
For some products, however, it is better to buy British. British onions,
for example, produce 14kg per tonne less CO2 than
those imported from New
Zealand.
What is clear is that the so-called "carbon footprint" left by
a product is a good deal more complicated than simply looking at the distance
it has travelled. Food miles have become the villain in the environmental
debate over the global food market, with campaigners counting every mile
their organic blueberries and sugarsnap peas have
travelled.
But even the method of transport is generating controversy. Some researchers
claim shipping is better than air freight, but others insist that for
perishable goods, packing them into a plane for a quick journey is better
than refrigerating them on a cargo ship. Air freight contributes just 0.1 per
cent to Britain's
carbon dioxide emissions.
The disagreement over exactly how to measure the carbon footprint of food
has lead to the Government stepping in. Last week, the Department for
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs announced it was developing a standard
carbon calculator that all manufacturers and retailers could use to label
their products. But a study by Bangor
University, due to be
completed this year, is set to complicate matters further. Researchers have
found that the number of times a patch of soil is ploughed, and even the type
of soil a vegetable is grown in, radically alters the amount of greenhouse
gases released into the atmosphere.
This could mean that clay soil in one part of the world may release more
greenhouse gases than sandy soil elsewhere. Indeed, calculations of carbon
dioxide emissions could also include the footprint left by employees involved
in the production of food. Per capita carbon dioxide emissions in Britain are 9.2 tonnes,
while for Kenya the figure
is 0.2 tonnes and for Uganda it is 0.1 tonnes. By this method, importing from Africa
would be far less environmentally damaging.
Despite this, supermarkets have been eager to demonstrate their
commitment to British food with Waitrose, Sainsbury's and Tesco all running
campaigns to emphasise that they buy much of their
produce locally. A spokesman for Tesco said: "Transportation is only a
very small part of the carbon emissions created by food production. We try to
use food from local sources because our customers like it."
Yet many blame the supermarkets for creating the problem with food miles
in the first place, by pandering to consumer demand for produce out of
season. Dr Jonathan Scurlock, the chief adviser on
climate change for the National Farmers Union, said: "Consumers are
given the expectation that you can get anything at any time of year. Farmers
feel there is an unfair flooding of UK retailers with imported
products like lamb as a result. "
Anti-poverty groups, however, fear that a return to seasonal, locally
sourced produce could end up harming the economies of developing countries.
More than one million people in Africa are dependent on the trade supplying
fresh fruit and vegetables to Britain.
Ian Bretman, the deputy director of the Fairtrade Foundation, said: "The voices of people
from developing countries who do depend on exporting food must be heard.
There should be a balance between environmental impact and the sustainability
of a product."
Regardless of the carbon footprint issue, farmers on both sides of the
world are united on one subject: the way that supermarkets are driving down
prices. According to David McGaveston, the New Zealand
sheep farmer: "The returns are not what they used to be and the price of
lamb has dropped considerably over the past two years. It seems the price in
the UK
has stayed the same, but the supermarkets are paying us less for the meat.
There are just too many exporters being played off against each other. It's
not sustainable."
How the CO2 emissions compare:
Lamb
UK New Zealand
2,849kg CO2 per tonne of carcass
New Zealand
688kg CO2 per tonne of carcass
Lettuce (winter)
UK
3,720kg CO2 per tonne of lettuce (indoor
production)
Spain
3,560kg CO2 per tonne of lettuce
Apples (in May when off season in UK) The New York Times
UK
271kg CO2 per tonne of apples 185kg
New Zealand
CO2 per tonne of apples
Roses
Netherlands
35,000kg CO2 per 12,000 stems
Kenya
6,000kg CO2 per 12,000 stems
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Food That Travels Well
By JAMES E. McWILLIAMS
The New York Times
August 6, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Austin, Tex.
THE term “food miles” — how far food has traveled before you buy it — has
entered the enlightened lexicon. Environmental groups, especially in Europe,
are pushing for labels that show how far food has traveled to get to the
market, and books like Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A
Year of Food Life” contemplate the damage wrought by trucking, shipping and
flying food from distant parts of the globe.
There are many good reasons for eating local — freshness, purity, taste,
community cohesion and preserving open space — but none of these benefits
compares to the much-touted claim that eating local reduces fossil fuel consumption.
In this respect eating local joins recycling, biking to work and driving a
hybrid as a realistic way that we can, as individuals, shrink our carbon
footprint and be good stewards of the environment.
On its face, the connection between lowering food miles and decreasing
greenhouse gas emissions is a no-brainer. In Iowa, the typical carrot has
traveled 1,600 miles from California, a potato 1,200 miles from Idaho and a
chuck roast 600 miles from Colorado. Seventy-five percent of the apples sold
in New York City
come from the West Coast or overseas, the writer Bill McKibben
says, even though the state produces far more apples than city residents
consume. These examples just scratch the surface of the problem. In light of
this market redundancy, the only reasonable reaction, it seems, is to count
food miles the way a dieter counts calories.
But is reducing food miles necessarily good for the environment?
Researchers at Lincoln University in New
Zealand, no doubt responding to Europe’s
push for “food miles labeling,” recently published a study challenging the
premise that more food miles automatically mean greater fossil fuel
consumption. Other scientific studies have undertaken similar investigations.
According to this peer-reviewed research, compelling evidence suggests that
there is more — or less — to food miles than meets the eye.
It all depends on how you wield the carbon calculator. Instead of
measuring a product’s carbon footprint through food miles alone, the Lincoln
University scientists expanded their equations to include other
energy-consuming aspects of production — what economists call “factor inputs
and externalities” — like water use, harvesting techniques, fertilizer
outlays, renewable energy applications, means of transportation (and the kind
of fuel used), the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed during photosynthesis,
disposal of packaging, storage procedures and dozens of other cultivation
inputs.
Incorporating these measurements into their assessments, scientists
reached surprising conclusions. Most notably, they found that lamb raised on
New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to
Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while
British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because
poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four
times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other
side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. Similar
figures were found for dairy products and fruit.
These life-cycle measurements are causing environmentalists worldwide to
rethink the logic of food miles. New Zealand’s most prominent
environmental research organization, Landcare
Research-Manaaki Whenua,
explains that localism “is not always the most environmentally sound solution
if more emissions are generated at other stages of the product life cycle
than during transport.” The British government’s 2006 Food Industry
Sustainability Strategy similarly seeks to consider the environmental costs
“across the life cycle of the produce,” not just in transportation.
“Eat local” advocates — a passionate cohort of which I am one — are bound to interpret these findings as a threat. We
shouldn’t. Not only do life cycle analyses offer genuine opportunities for
environmentally efficient food production, but they also address several
problems inherent in the eat-local philosophy.
Consider the most conspicuous ones: it is impossible for most of the
world to feed itself a diverse and healthy diet through exclusively local
food production — food will always have to travel; asking people to move to
more fertile regions is sensible but alienating and unrealistic; consumers
living in developed nations will, for better or worse, always demand choices
beyond what the season has to offer.
Given these problems, wouldn’t it make more sense to stop obsessing over
food miles and work to strengthen comparative geographical advantages? And
what if we did this while streamlining transportation services according to
fuel-efficient standards? Shouldn’t we create development incentives for
regional nodes of food production that can provide sustainable produce for
the less sustainable parts of the nation and the world as a whole? Might it
be more logical to conceptualize a hub-and-spoke system of food production
and distribution, with the hubs in a food system’s naturally fertile hot
spots and the spokes, which travel through the arid zones, connecting them
while using hybrid engines and alternative sources of energy?
As concerned consumers and environmentalists, we must be prepared to
seriously entertain these questions. We must also be prepared to accept that buying
local is not necessarily beneficial for the environment. As much as this
claim violates one of our most sacred assumptions, life cycle assessments
offer far more valuable measurements to gauge the environmental impact of
eating. While there will always be good reasons to encourage the growth of
sustainable local food systems, we must also allow them to develop in tandem
with what could be their equally sustainable global counterparts. We must
accept the fact, in short, that distance is not the enemy of awareness.
James E. McWilliams is the author of “A Revolution in Eating: How the
Quest for Food Shaped America” and a contributing writer for The Texas
Observer
-----------------------------
Texas Observer
<http://www.texasobserver.org/toc.php?iid=252>August
10, 2007
Books and the Culture Issue
Moveable Feast
Eating Local Isn’t Always the Greenest Option
by James McWilliams
<http://www.powells.com/partner/32210/biblio/0805076263>Deep
Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
By Bill McKibben
Times Books
272 pages, $25
<http://www.powells.com/partner/32210/biblio/0060852550>Animal,
Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
By Barbaba Kingsolver
HarperCollins
384 pages, $26.95
<http://www.powells.com/partner/32210/biblio/030734732x>Plenty:
One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally
By Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon
Harmony
264 pages, $24
Eat Local. So goes the slogan for Farm to Market, a South Austin grocery
store known for its produce from small farms throughout Central
Texas. This attractive venue just celebrated its two-year
anniversary, and while I have no idea how it’s doing financially, it has
captured the attention of neighborhood residents, a notable percentage of
whom drive around town with the market’s slogan, adorned with a beet, stuck
on their bumpers. No matter that a majority of the goods stocking Farm to
Market’s shelves have crisscrossed the world to keep our pantries full. It’s
the intention that counts, and few intentions are as
inherently noble, and potentially beneficial, as buying locally produced
food.
Central to the Eat Local philosophy is the idea of “food miles”how far food travels before you buy it. The idea
has entered the enlightened mainstream through an increasingly rare venue:
books! It achieved critical cultural mass last year with Michael Pollan’s bestselling Omnivore’s Dilemma and has since
exploded into the media stratosphere with Bill McKibben’s
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future; Alisa Smith’s
and J.B. MacKinnon’s Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating
Locally; and Barbara Kingsolver’s (also bestselling) Animal, Vegetable,
Miracle: A Year of Food Life (written with her husband, Steven L. Hopp, and daughter, Camille Kingsolver). The attention
these titles have generated has, somewhat miraculously, transformed the art
of eating into what it has, on some level, always been: a political act.
There are many good reasons for eating localfreshness,
purity, taste, community cohesion, and preserving open spacebut,
perhaps because of overwhelming media attention to global warming, none of
these benefits compares to the much-touted claim that eating local reduces
fossil fuel consumption. Herein lies the current
power of the Eat Local slogan. In this respect, eating local joins recycling,
biking to work, and driving a hybrid as realistic ways we can, as
individuals, shrink our “carbon footprint” in the collective effort to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions.
Barbara Kingsolver
Each of these books employs the conceit of the authors’ limiting their
diet to locally produced food, and each is emphatic about the supposedly
irrefutable connection between eating local and energy reduction. “The
average food item on a U.S.
grocery shelf,” writes novelist Kingsolver, “has traveled farther than most
families go on their family vacations.” Her husband, Steven Hopp, reminds readers that, “If every U.S. citizen ate
just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised
meats and produce, we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1
million barrels every week.” Concerns over inflated food miles brought Alisa
Smith and J.B. MacKinnon to their dietary challenge as well. “Each time we
sat down to eat,” writes MacKinnon, a former Adbusters
editor, “we were consuming products that had traveled the equivalent distance
of a drive from ... New York City to Denver, Colorado.
We were living on an SUV diet.” Bill McKibben, a Middlebury College scholar-in-residence, made a
similar culinary decision upon learning that “the average bite of American
food has traveled more than 1,500 miles before it reaches your lips.” Our
food, he writes, “arrives at the table marinated in oilcrude
oil.” As a result, “if we took global warming seriously,” we’d start
supporting local food systems. The proposition that eating local will reduce
energy consumption unifies these books.
As presented, it’s an overwhelmingly convincing point. Kingsolver, as
well as Smith and McKinnon, generally assume what McKibben
(whose book is the only one of the three with footnotes and an index)
studiously reveals: a compendium of alarming statistics informing the
decision to eat local. (This line of reasoning might otherwise strike
skeptical readers as a gimmick designed to sell books; after all, nobody is
writing impassioned volumes about their personal experiences carpooling in a
hybrid for a year.) Applying his trademark solid research, McKibben amasses examples of food miles run amok. We
learn that in Iowa“center of the agricultural heartland”carrots
come 1,690 miles from California, potatoes
1,292 miles from Idaho, and chuck roasts 600
miles from Colorado.
He writes that producing and transporting frozen peas demands 10 times the
energy in the peas themselves. Seventy-five percent of the apples sold in New York statean apple-producing regioncome
from the West Coast. On and on it goes. In light of this compelling evidence
of market redundancy, corporate consolidation, and “creative destruction,”
the only reasonable reaction, it seems, is to slap one of those bumper
stickers on the Volvo wagon and start living the gospel of Eat Local.
[]
At this point I would normally declare “Amen” and offer capsule reviews
of each book, noting how McKibben’s is rigorous, if
at times idealistic; how Kingsolver’s is charming but analytically slack; and
how Smith and MacKinnon are creative geniuses in the kitchen but, somewhat
obnoxiously, rather too proud of it. There are, however, bigger fish to frystarting with the premise that reducing food miles is
necessarily good for the environment.
The argument that reducing food miles decreases fossil fuel consumption
appears so obvious, so intuitively logical, that it would seem anyone who
questions it must be insane, work for Exxon Mobil, or live in the
food-exporting nation of New
Zealand. In this case, it’s the third
option. In 2006, New Zealand’s Lincoln University, no doubt responding to
Europe’s push for “food miles labeling,” published a study challenging the
premise that greater food miles alone automatically means greater fossil fuel
consumption. Other studies, only now edging onto the media’s radar screens,
have undertaken similar investigations. According to this peer-reviewed
research, compelling evidence suggests there is moreor lessto food miles
than our abstemious authors would lead us to believe.
To appreciate the Lincoln
University research, it
is critical to understand how the authors wielded their carbon calculators.
Rather than measuring a product’s carbon footprint through food miles alone,
the scientists expanded their equations to include dozens of other energy
consuming factorswhat economists call “externalities”including water usage, harvesting
techniques, fertilizer outlays, renewable energy applications, means of
transportation (and the kind of fuel used), the amount of carbon absorbed
during photosynthesis, disposal of product packaging, storage procedures, and
dozens of other obscure cultivation inputs. Discussing the need to rethink
our food system in terms of distances traveled, Kingsolver writes, “this
isn’t rocket science.” But as the Lincoln
University method
suggests, when you factor in the externalities of life-cycle assessments, it
sort of is rocket science.
[]
By incorporating more measures, scientists reached surprising
conclusions. Most notably, they found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s fertile pastures and shipped by
boat to the U.K.
consumed 688 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions per ton. By contrast,
stock produced within the U.K.’s
poorly adapted pastures consumed 2,849 kilograms per ton. In other words, it
is four times more energy efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from
the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard.
This kind of figure cannot be ignored, especially after similar numbers were
calculated for dairy productsa result, once again,
of comparative advantage and what some food mile skeptics are starting to
call “ecology of scale.”
For the most part, these figures and their implications have not been
ignored. One can hardly fault the volumes under review for not mentioning the
Lincoln University study, as it almost
certainly came out when these books were in press. Nonetheless, it is worth
wondering how the authors would have adjusted their arguments in light of the
report and what has followed. For example, New Zealand’s most prominent
environmental research organization, the Landcare ResearchManaaki Whenua,
reassessed its position on local consumption after the study was published.
“Localism,” two Landcare scientists wrote in late
2006, “is not always the most environmentally sound solution if more
emissions are generated at other stages of the product life cycle during
transport.” In Britain,
the environmental group U.K. Food Industry Sustainability Strategy responded
to the report by conceding that “products shipped from New Zealand by sea may have significantly
lower environmental impacts than those traveling shorter distances in Europe.” The Gallon Environment Letter, a Canadian
publication, informed its readers that “certain products can be transported
long distances and still use less energy overall than a regionally or locally
produced product.” Convinced that I was missing something as I read these
reports, I called Valentine Cadieux, head of the
Yale Sustainable Food Project in New
Haven, Connecticut,
and a staunch Eat Local advocate. With respect to the Lincoln study, she said that, indeed, “the
core argument is valid.”
While challenges to the Eat Local philosophy have received little
attention in U.S.
media, the European press pounced on the news of life cycle assessments. The
Guardian wrote how “consumers who make their choices on air miles alone may
be doing more environmental harm.” BBC News explained in a story titled “Food
Miles Don’t Go the Distance” that food mile advocates “may seem to have
common sense on their side, [but] the science which could be used to underpin
their arguments is at best confusing, and at worst absent.” The Scotsman
reported that “consumers who try to cut down on the number of ‘food miles’ in
their weekly shop by choosing local produce could be doing more harm than
good.” The Economist warned that “the apparently straightforward approach of
minimizing the ‘food miles’ associated with your weekly groceries does not,
in fact, always result in the smallest possible environmental impact.”
[]
Life cycle assessments have yet to be undertaken systematically in the United States.
When they are, the assumption that local consumption is automatically energy
efficient will be seriously muddied. I’ll admit thatas
someone who has written books about our ancestors’ intimate ties to the soilmy gut reaction is to dismiss life cycle assessments
as a threat to the localism that Kingsolver, McKibben,
Smith, and MacKinnon value so deeply. But stepping back and putting my
assumptions aside, I also see in life cycle analyses genuine opportunities
for changes that will lead to environmentally efficient food production.
Rather than reject what might seem to be inconvenient findings, Eat Local
advocates would be wise to consider them, because, properly analyzed and
acted upon, they are anything but threatening to the prospect of an
environmentally responsible diet. In fact, they could help solve several
problems inherent in the Eat Local movementproblems
that are often on vivid display in these books.
One such problem involves the way the Eat Local movement downplays
geographical reality. Kingsolver, McKibben, Smith,
and MacKinnonall passionate food milersdownplay the impact geography has on their
culinary options. It was, after all, Arizona’s
horrific geographical conditionsones that favor
cactus fruits and tubersthat inspired Kingsolver
and her family to take “the trip of our lives” to southern Virginia, where they would “begin the
adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain.” Choosing to move to a
fertile region supportive of a healthy year-round subsistence, Kingsolver not
only solved her food mile problem, buta point not
meaningfully appreciatedshe solved her food cycle
problem as well. It is hard to take issue with this environmentally
responsible decision. But we should take issue with the fact that within
weeks, Kingsolver’s new geographical circumstance, one of rare
sustainability, becomes in her mind something of a standard experience. While
Kingsolver was rhapsodizing over asparagus, I was left wondering about the 1
million Tucson
residents she left behind, stuck in that life cycle disaster called a desert.
What does her experience say to them? As it turns out, they quickly disappear
into Kingsolver’s geographical amnesia, phantom members of a society mired in
a nonsustainable grid and, sadly for them,
irrelevant to the noble project that Kingsolver and her family accomplish
with elegance, wit, and satiation. Kingsolver’s geography, in essence,
becomes the privileged geography of the Eat Local movement.
McKibben is a bit guilty of a similar
amnesia. Though undoubtedly well informed about relative food producing
efficiencies among different regions, he assumes that his situation in the
Lake Champlain Valleya place that can, with some
belt-tightening, provide sustainable food for most
of the yearis somehow typical. Like Michael Pollan, he waxes eloquently and brilliantly on the scale,
scope, and well-honed efficiencies of local farming. McKibben
argues convincingly that much of the East Coast could, with a few
adjustments, easily supply all its own food. It’s great stuff. However, he
overlooks the demographic reality that a growing majority of the nation lives
in (or is moving to) regions where water is imported, soil is artificially
enhanced, and the trucks that pick the food up and send it off are the
crudest of guzzlers. All of which is to say that McKibben’s
deeply researched and humanistic accounts of Eat Local victories sparkle for
regions endowed with the life cycle systems to pull the victories off. For
those of us poor saps stuck in locations where sustainability is a cruel
joke, we can only enjoy the experience vicariously, or plan to subsist on
beef jerky and well water. Like Kingsolver, McKibben
has a hard time mentioning the dirty secret called The Arid West.
[]
Then there’s the experience of Smith and MacKinnon, who try to eat local
in a semi-sustainable environment. Choosing to undertake their “100 mile
diet” in Vancouver, where geographical conditions support an erratic local
food supply at best, the authors are reduced to what at times read like
panicked, animalistic foraging for wayward ingredients. In the name of food
miles, the authors, who it must be noted became incredibly creative cooks,
twist and turn and stretch a grossly limited food supply into “meals” that
they somehow manage to stoically enjoy, even if they are anxiously having
discussions about weight loss, scurvy, and protein deficiency while nibbling
on stored turnips and worrying about lowered sex drives. If you’re wondering
what it is like to eat local in the wrong place: It sucks.
I watched these authors negotiate their self-imposed decisions, made
primarily in the name of reducing food miles, with great interest. While I
appreciated their personal experiences, as well as the passion and poignancy
of their writing, one thing soon became depressingly clear: No way on earth
would any of these solutions, or anything remotely like these solutions, work
for me. The reason: geography. I live in Central Texaswhere
it would take ample financial resources and a willingness to accept a
severely limited diet to eat local year-round. More importantly, we live in a
world where demography (for better or worse) responds to economic opportunity
rather than geographical fertility. Herein lies the elephant in the room: For
environmentally concerned Americans wedded to food mile measurements, the
only viable answers for reducing our dietary carbon footprint are to move to
a fertile region (Kingsolver, McKibben), to live
off root crops, game, and preserved food (Smith and MacKinnon), or to starve
(almost Smith and McKinnon). Favoring food miles over life cycle assessments,
the authors have established a simple premise for readable books, but they
have also obscured an alternative scenario, one that would serve their basic
environmental goals while offering mainstream environmentalists more
pragmatic solutions than moving to Appalachia, hunting elk, or flirting with
scurvy.
Here are what I see as unshakable realities framing the food wars,
realities the authors do not face:
* The United States, not to mention the world, cannot provide
a diverse, locally based diet for all citizens.
* Asking people to move to more fertile regions is entirely unrealisticin fact, it’s about
the quickest way I can think of to alienate potential environmentalists.
* In a nation of 300 million people and a world of 7 billion
people, food will always have to travel, sometimes very long distances.
* Consumers living in developed nations are always going to
demand choices beyond what the season has to offer.
What I’m thus envisioning, based on these realities and the most recent
research, is a pragmatic scenario built on a
geographical model that, as the Lincoln study proposes, thinks primarily in
terms of comparative life cycles. Given the severe geographical and cultural
limitations inherent in the Eat Local philosophy, wouldn’t it make more sense
to stop obsessing over food miles, stay put, work to strengthen comparative
geographical advantages, and make transportation more fuel-efficient?
Shouldn’t we encourage (through subsidies, legislation, moral
suasion) regional nodes capable of supplying sustainable produce for the less
sustainable parts of the nation (and the world)? Might it be more logical to
conceptualize a hub-and-spoke system of food production and distribution,
with the hubs located in a food system’s naturally fertile hot spots and the
spokes, which travel through arid zones, connecting them with vehicles using
hybrid engines and ethanol fuel?
[]
Granted, the idea is a skeleton without flesh, and it is being discussed
without the least regard to what are sure to be daunting political obstacles.
Still, I think these are lines along which Eat Local advocates would be wise
to start thinking. With a dash of imagination, one can see how, properly
developed, a life cycle, hub-and-spoke system could meet Eat Local’s
environmental goal of fossil fuel reduction, and at the same time diminish
many of Eat Local’s less obvious, but often alienating, hang-ups.
An emphasis on life cycle analyses could help free the Eat Local movement
from an unfair burden it currently bearsa strong
whiff of hypocrisy. Buying locally is the easiest way to buy into what some
skeptics call the “light green movement.” Like any movement, Eat Local is
prone to insincerity and self-righteousness, with “environmental chic”
sometimes outweighing concern about global warming. One gets a glimpse of
this tendency when MacKinnon repeatedly visits the local chicken farm to
ensure that the birds are happy before he buys one to kill, or when Smith
experiences existential angst over whether “we would eat vegetables grown in
manure from local cows that ate non-local feed?” Small potatoes, no?
Depoliticizing the local-imported distinction might allow people with
genuine concerns about global warming to focus less on the external inputs
into cow manure, and more on raising fuel-economy standards, taking on
corporate waste, and eliminating coal-fired power plants. Browsing a farmer’s
market with a hemp bag that reads “this bag is not plastic” is an innocuous
(if a little annoying) display of environmental awareness. A quiet (or not so
quiet) campaign to raise fuel standards or shut down coal plants that carries
none of the “light green” sexiness of food politics strikes closer to the
heart of global warming. Optimistically, one could reason that an intense
awareness of food miles would, like a gateway drug, lead to more potent
environmental tactics. It is equally likely, however, that the “light green”
food shopper who owns a second home in the Poconos and flies there three times
a year is going to salve her conscience with local heirloom tomatoes rather
than using them to throw at Monsanto executives.
A second issue that the hub-and-spoke vision addresses is that of
nostalgia. Too many authors who stump for the Eat Local movement have an
overly precious, deeply mythologized view of agricultural history. To an
extent, the authors under review all indulge in a declension narrative
whereby an elusive golden age of farmingmarked by
ecological harmony, self-subsistence, and homemade piessuccumbs
to the filth, grit, and greed of industrialization. “When we walked as a
nation away from the land,” writes Kingsolver, “our knowledge of food
production fell away from us like dirt in a laundry-soap commercial.” The
nation’s “drift away from our agricultural roots,” she writes in what may be
the weirdest historical segue I have ever encountered, began when “munitions
plants” started making chemical fertilizers. The result, Kingsolver says, is
that “we don’t know beans about beans.” Smith and MacKinnon are equally
outraged with this decline. “Fifty years ago,” they lament, “there was still
widespread connection to food and the places that it comes from. ... Many
people kept kitchen gardens, raised chickens, or knew a beekeeper.” Today,
“legions of modern children have never seen a cow.”
As an historian who studies agriculture, I’m troubled by these
characterizations because they ignore the fact that, from the moment
Americans began farming, landowners worked to achieve nearly everything the Eat Local groupies lament. Farmers wanted to trade
internationally; they wanted to achieve scale economies; they wanted to
industrialize (usually); they wanted insecticides, mechanization, and
irrigation systems; they wanted to leave the farm when other opportunities
arose; they would have been happy if their children never saw a cow; and they
sure as hell would have liked a little commercial soap to remove the dirt
from their soiled overalls.
So does this call to arms against an exclusive “food mile” assessment
suggest that we should stop eating local, rip off the sticker, and head to
the nearest Wal-Mart? Of course not. It means that weas
individuals, as consumers, as environmentalistsshould
place the act of eating local in a broader perspective, one that goes beyond
food miles to recognize the emerging realities of life cycle externalities.
We must appreciate the fact that buying local, while in many ways virtuous,
might not always benefit the environment. As much as this claim violates
deeply held assumptions, life cycle assessments are far more valuable than
food mile measurements in gauging the environmental impact of eating. We must
appreciate that while there is every reason to encourage the development of
efficient local food systems, they will inevitably develop in tandem with
global counterparts. The world’s population is expanding; we must get over
our fear of bigness and support this co-development. Bigger, if properly
managed and regulated, could in many cases be better. Finally, we must appreciate
that nobody wants to be scolded because of diet; nobody likes to be told how
to eat. The beauty of thinking globally and locally about food production
based on ecologies of scale and life cycle assessments is that, in a
well-regulated international system, choice would matter less. A novelist
could move to the Appalachians and start growing kale, and that would be
fine. A scholar could eat what the icy ground had to offer for a long winter,
and that would be fine. A young couple with a taste for sadomasochism could
hole up in a Canadian shack and eat their “100-mile diet,” and that would be
fine. The rest of us could take on the coal lobby, the CAFE fuel-use
standards, and the oil giants, and then go have a hassle-free lunch.
And that, too, would be fine.
James McWilliams, a contributing writer, is the author most recently of
Building the Bay Colony: Economy and Society in Early Massachusetts. He will
spend the upcoming academic year as a fellow in the agrarian studies program
at Yale University.
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