the local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas. Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel by “locavores,” celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental organizations.
…The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far.
Stephen Budiansky in the NY Times. Hat tip to James Choi.
Now: unleash the angry commenters!
8 Responses
Over at my blog, I address one of the critics, who largely talks past the main point and is instead offended at being called a dogmatist instead of someone who follows democratic values.
All of these pseudo-contrarians argue against bizarre strawmen of locavorism that I, at least, have never met (and I hang out in the respective circles quite a bit).
Yes, maybe it’s worth making the point that eating local makes no or a very small contribution to the carbon footprint of food. But that’s really a quite minor point.
And when an article that argues against “locavorism” takes tomatoes from a heated greenhouse as an example that’s just a sign that it’s not arguing in good faith – no locavore in her right mind eats greenhouse tomatoes.
Also, many locavores will eat shipped fruit that don’t grow locally – Pollan has a little section on that in the Omnivore’s Dilemma.
And finally, I don’t think that carbon footprints are the biggest concern of locavores. That would be the nature of the supply chain. I buy my vegetables from the people who grow them. I know who they are, how they think about food etc. That means I’m close to the food I eat, that means I eat safer food and that means I support local agricultural landscapes (rather than big industrial monocultures) that means I support sustainable soil practices etc.
I’m pro science. When you find an article that speaks to actual locavores instead of a bizarre caricature I’d be interested.
Hardly new news. One report showed that frozen New Zealand lamb, shipped to hte UK, had lower emissions than Welsh hillside lamb. Another, actually done by hte Govt, showed that trucking in sun grown tomatoes from Spain had less emissions than greenhouse tomatoes grown in England.
And certainly economists shouldn’t be surprised: it’s right there in Adam Smith, talking about growing grapes in Scotland or buying in Bourdeaux.
As to eating both seasonally and locally….not going to happen in the UK, not when that means at least 6 weeks each year on nothing but turnips.
Good grief, we’re bothering to quote the NYT on a challenging and technical topic? That’s got to be the holy mother of confirmation biases?
Since when has the NYT covered, for example, the technical concerns surrounding development well?
They’re just selling papers by ginning up controversy. Americans spend half of their food money on food away from home, and get about 1/3 of their actual food from it. There’s no way that statistic is correct.
Good God, man, have some standards.
I find it ironic that while people from countries that don’t have access to certain types of food year round would love to have the availability of fresh produce that the west does, regardless of where it’s shipped from. And then people in the west say that it wastes too much energy to ship these things in. I bet if your food choices were restricted, you would be complaining of lack of choice, not of wasting energy.
I think this argument is important, but also a bit silly. A true locavore out East would probably not be buying fresh tomatoes in the dead of winter – they’d mostly be buying mountains of kale. It’s not just about eating things that are grown locally but also seasonally. Maybe this is why we need a good labeling system for everything we buy, because at the moment we can only guess how much energy our food used to get to where it is, and people often have incorrect assumptions about that. It’s the same with lights: LED lights might look expensive to buy, but if you incorporate the energy use costs and factor in the lifetime, they might be cheaper than incandescent or fluorescent lights. Clearly dogma is not useful, but there is a clear lack of useful information in the marketplace, so you have to fall back on decision-making rule, right?
Pesky facts.
I did an (admittedly brief) study on this a few years ago; living in Canada as we do, localvorism only makes sense seasonally. Storage of food can take as much, if not more, energy than transporting it (shipping is relativey low-e compared to trucks; rail is the best. So where food is from makes a difference). It’s highly crop-dependent.
As a rule, it’s usually equivalent, and often (spring/summer/fall) better. The cultivation techniques change things too, of course, and etc.
You think home heating is bad? Industrial heating is worse – offices, supermarkets, factories, they’re all hideous energy consumers.
Two other points:
1. Dogma is a bad thing always. It’s to be avoided. I prefer “thinking,” myself. It’s unfortunate that it’s easier to take intellectual shortcuts that favour personal biases when attempting to achieve a goal; everything in moderation, etc.
2. Just because one thing is environmentally destructive doesn’t mean that efforts to be less so in other areas of our lives are worthless. There’s a whole other 60% to be addressed there, and reducing it by 10% is not trivial.