Summarizing some points on local food, community supported agriculture (CSAs), and energy, here's a Youtube catch.
By virtue of its length (3 minutes) and forum (You Tube), it necessarily glosses over the structural issues that make food issues as complex as they are (things like economic opportunities, class and race-based contexts, trade policy, energy policy, and...wait for it...consumption patterns), but still, a good synopsis of some basic matters.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Slate has a column called "The Green Lantern: Illuminating answers to environmental questions." This response to a question about CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) was nicely done. CSAs are one of the many things Michael Pollan touched on in his recent, already widely read, already widely…
My absolute favorite kinds of presentations to give (even though they are by far the most work) are the one's I've been doing increasingly often, giving analyses of regional food security.
I focus on both present and prospective food issues in a lower energy, less economically stable and warmer…
On the subject of silly things said about academia, Matt Yglesias does a quick pass over "assessment,", and in the process recommends Alan Kruger's research that claims the benefits of elite colleges are all from selection effects. He links a Newsweek article on the topic, which contains this…
First of all, I owe y'all an apology for the radio silence. Somehow this month I've felt a deep need for some quiet, rest and offlineness. It was quite an autumn here - it started with the destruction of Irene and Lee (and dealing with those disasters are still a major part of life in our…
Hm. I know this organization exists to promote local food and local farming, but it's weird that they completely glossed over the fact that changing whether or not you eat meat is a dramatically more effective (and easy, IMO) way to reduce your food's carbon footprint than buying local food.
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/esthag/2008/42/i10/abs/es70296…
"Shifting less than one day per weeks worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food."
This study doesn't even quantify the benefits of switching to an all-veggie diet, which would be even more substantial.
Which isn't to say that eating local food has no effect. And the more people clamor for local food, the more local options will become available. It's just not the most effective way to eat more carbon-smart, as the video claims. Not by a long shot.
I hear a lot about this stuff where I live. But why then are farmers market foods so d*mn expensive!?! I save a lot of money going to the local grocery, and buying that tomato that was picked green and ripened in transit. And I'm not such a food snob that it's constantly worth paying an extra couple bucks, just to get some so-called "vine-ripened" taste. Puh-lease!
Don't get me wrong. I'm all about saving oil and making agriculture more efficient. BUT there's a hell of a lot of righteous hand-waving on the part of "local-ivores" and I'm not yet seeing ANY DATA WHATSOEVER to support the notion that it is genuinely more efficient to grow and distribute food on a strictly local basis. (No, that YouTube video did not present "data.") If anything, I'm more likely to believe that large-scale industrial farms are able to take advantage of economies of scale to do things more efficiently. You need an infrastructure for delivery, regardless of whether it is delivering food to your supermarket, or fuel to your local farms.
The null hypothesis is that industrial agriculture is no more or less efficient than local agriculture. I have seen no data so far that encourage me to reject this hypothesis.
Show me some data, some studies, and I'll be the first to convert. Until you show DATA, it's just a fad like anything else: Vitamin C megadoses, herbal therapies, and mystic gemstone power.
And consider this: if EVERYBODY ate mostly local food, think how much of your local open space would have to be converted from forest, field, parkland, wild space, whatever... into crop land. My wild speculation is that it would take a LOT of habitat destruction to accomplish this where I live, and a lot of fragmentation/compartmentalization of ecosystems. Maybe there's actually an environmentally responsible way to implement that, but if you want to do it on a national scale, that is not a trivial change to our environment.
I'd rather buy bulk foods (no packaging) and low-processed foods, than fret about how far my pineapple traveled to get to my kitchen. 90% of my junk comes from China, anyway...
My local farmers market is cheaper than the local supermarkets, or at least no different to their free-range/artisan lines. In fact, some of the best beef I've ever tasted comes from less than 20 miles away, and is certainly cheaper than anything from the supermarkets.
Unfortunately, lots of people look, but then drive to the supermarket at the weekend and load up their car, which is why the market is slowly dying. The reality is that the drive to the supermarket is the last in a long chain of trips from the farmers field all made possible by relatively cheap fossil fuel. Supermarkets are happy with the lunacy of trucking carrots hundreds of miles around the country, only to bring them back to your local store and label it local. It suits them, its part of their business model, but it is extremely wasteful.
Its obviously not realistic to expect everything you eat to come from no more than say, 50 miles away. I'm from the UK, and while local eating in January might be fine in California (the Santa Monica farmers market report at the start of KCRW's Good Food always makes me jealous!), its not going to be much fun where I am. However, we should remember that until relatively recently, most food was local, often home-grown. We may have to get used to much of it returning to be that way.
Personally, I think our mantra should be to use no more than we need, to get the best quality, to waste as little as we can, and to source it as locally as possible, using as few inputs as we can get away with. As a supermarket here in the UK puts it - 'good food, honestly priced', but with the price including all the costs.
A study came out a few weeks ago that concluded that, in some cases, food imported from other areas may have less of a carbon footprint associated with them than local foods. If you take a brand-new tractor-trailer from California to Pennsylvania, full of a few thousand cucumbers, and compare the carbon output per cucumber to that from a 20-year old clunker truck bringing in a hundred of them from 30 miles away, the long-distance sometimes comes out ahead.
As for the cost of farmer's market food, the author of The Sixty-Five Dollar Tomato makes a good point - try growing food yourself, and you'll see what a good deal the farmer's market food is. Sure, seeds are cheap, but add in good soil, fertilizer, the labor involved, and it adds up. And buying local isn't just about you; it's a way to support the local economy, which helps out the tax base, the attractiveness of the community to influx, etc.
Its obviously not realistic to expect everything you eat to come from no more than say, 50 miles away. I'm from the UK, and while local eating in January might be fine in California (the Santa Monica farmers market report at the start of KCRW's Good Food always makes me jealous!), its not going to be much fun where I am. However, we should remember that until relatively recently, most food was local, often home-grown. We may have to get used to much of it returning to be that way.
Personally, I think our mantra should be to use no more than we need, to get the best quality, to waste as little as we can, and to source it as locally as possible, using as few inputs as we can get away with. As a supermarket here in the UK puts it - 'good food, honestly priced', but with the price including all the costs.
The reality is that the drive to the supermarket is the last in a long chain of trips from the farmers field all made possible by relatively cheap fossil fuel. Supermarkets are happy with the lunacy of trucking carrots hundreds of miles around the country, only to bring them back to your local store and label it local. It suits them, its part of their business model, but it is extremely wasteful.