Dissing on Local Food

Note: this was written about a few weeks ago but it never got edited and posted.


While I would much rather be reading Harry Potter 7 during my daughter's naptime, I unfortunately (for me, hopefully not for you!) feel the need to respond to this irritating op-ed in the New York Times today.

The gist of the essay is that while it seems intuitive that eating locally would be better for the environment, there have been studies that show that maybe it is not. The author argues that there are parts of the globe that are very efficient at growing food and that instead of trying to grow food in places where it is inefficient that we should just focus on shipping food from places where it is efficient to places that are inefficient. Whew. Here's the most important section of the essay:

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.

This all makes logical sense, but it does not take into account a very important aspect of the local food movement. Eating locally means eating seasonally and it means eating foods, animal and vegetable, that can be raised naturally in your region. Just because it is possible to grow tomatos in a heated hydroponic greenhouse in the winter doesn't mean we should do it! If Britain doesn't have sufficient pasture to raise lamb, (actually I find this hard to believe, maybe a certain part of Britain doesn't, but I know for sure that the whole country isn't devoid of grass) well then a local foodie should be eating seafood. Or some other creature more adapted to the area.

We humans are incredibly flexible in what sorts of foods we can survive on. We have flourished all over the globe, jungle to desert, without super highways and planes to transport our food. We will have to make sacrifices in order to bring our society back into balance with the earth. We might not get tomatos and strawberries all year round, and we may never see a pineapple (as you can see, the northeast united states is the center of my world). The good news is that we have many new worlds of food to discover. Industrial farming and food shipping, rather than increasing the diversity of food we eat, has a tendency to shrink it. Instead of growing our local, carefully bred, plant varieties and domesticated animals (as well as eating the local wild plants and animals), we have started to eat the same things everywhere. I've done my share of traveling in this country and every time I walk into a supermarket it looks like I could be anywhere. The same apples, same tomatos, same onions, same chicken, same beef. It's very homogenous.

The author is right. If we want to be able to get anything, anywhere, all year around, then yes, it is probably more efficient to put our focus on creating enormous, "super-efficient", industrial food growing operations and shipping food globally. While the idea of being able to get anything I want sure is enticing, (and I have to confess that, while I do buy local a lot, I am not the best seasonal eater) there are a lot of losses to a system like that:

1.) As I have already mentioned, food diversity.
2.) Our local economies lose out when we buy 1,000 mile apples versus 10 mile apples.
3.) Food safety and food security. If we were eating locally we would not be experiencing nationwide food recalls. We would not have to dispose of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of pounds of possibly tainted spinach, or beef, or milk. When our food production becomes centralized we become vulnerable to disasters that can result in catastrophic food shortages. When our production is decentralized, we can create local food security through local food production. If one community loses its crops, theres the next one down the road vs. relying on one area (ie California) to produce a marority of the veggies for a whole large country (ie the United States).
4.) Vegetables that travel are less nutritious. Nutrients break down over time so the quicker it gets from the farm to your table the more nutricious the food is. The author of the article plays this off as being about a privileged and unimportant desire for taste, but (assuming it hasn't been adulterated by taste enhancing chemicals) taste tells us something abour our food. We know when we're eating good food and a seasonal local heirloom tomato tastes richer and better than a bland, ethylene spray ripened, California grown (remember folks I'm on the east coast), January tomato, because it is richer and better.
5.) The environment. While I totally agree that it is not efficient to try to produce plants or nurture animals in an environment that they are not suited for, I question whether that study has compared small or medium sized organic farms striving for sustainability with large industrial farms from far away. It makes sense that a large industrial farm could, through size, become more efficient with its machines, more efficient with its chemicals, and more efficient with packing and transporting. But what about small local intensive farms that are using little input because they are being careful and concious about their resources? Now if Whole Foods would just buy directly from those farms instead of making them ship their products hundreds of miles to their processing facilities that ship the food back hundreds of miles to the local Whole Foods...