Food Miles

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1553456/Greener-by-miles.html

<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/>
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Greener by miles

The Daily Telegraph
March 3, 2007

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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."
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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

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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
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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?
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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.