The 100 mile diet ain't all it's cracked up to be.
http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=2318164
Eat Global, Not Local
At the annual convention of the North American Farmers' Direct Marketing Association in Calgary a couple of years ago, organizers offered a seminar entitled "The New Classic: Creating an upscale urban farmers' market with down-home country Chutzpah." For years, local farmers' markets weren't anything you'd hazard to call "upscale," but the rise of the local food movement and the best-selling environmental-soul books, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and The 100-Mile Diet, has made buying locally grown, rather than well-travelled food, as trendy these days among the eco-yuppie crowd as hybrid Lexuses and Baby Planet strollers. "Farmers have been involved with selling local product for decades. What's happening now is that the consumer side is catching on," says Charlie Touchette, executive director of the marketing association.
In Alberta, farmers' market revenues next year are projected to be roughly twice 2004's take; Vancouver's markets have more than doubled their customers, and revenues, since 2005. Although that "down-home country" marketing is key to making shoppers feel the trendy, earthy vibe, with prices often dramatically higher than supermarkets, the big demographic draw comes from the well-heeled.
A farmers' market research report by the Cascade Harvest Coalition, a Seattle-based group promoting local food, concluded that one of the big challenges to markets was reaching "mid-level or second-tier" consumers, who, studies showed, stayed away, in large part, because of affordability.
In part, farmer vendors charge more because they've been suddenly blessed with customers willing to pay more. But locally grown food, in many cases, is also more costly to produce, because Canadian labour and, often, land is worth more than in Brazil or China. Above all, though, local growing conditions for most foods are less productive than elsewhere. Every climate, obviously, has its strengths and weaknesses, and frequently, locally grown food is less efficiently produced than the imported stuff. Accounting for "food miles" -- the key measure used by locavores (local produce eaters) -- tells you how far food travels. It doesn't tell you how much energy -- and greenhouse gas emissions -- went into growing it. When you add that in, and if your aim is to conserve fossil fuels and emissions, the best way is actually to skip the farmers' market and eat global.
"If you are concerned about the carbon footprint of your diet, focusing on transportation is kind of like worrying about the air pressure in your tires of your car rather than whether you have a fuel-efficient car or not," says James McWilliams, an environmental and agricultural historian at Texas State University, author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, and a former part-time locavore. "What matters so much more than how far it travels from farm to fork is what kind of methods were used to produce it."
In fact, farming methods make up so much more of a particular food's carbon footprint, it is remarkable that all those food-mile-counters missed it. A 2008 study published in the academic journal, Environmental Science and Technology by a pair of environmental engineers at Carnegie Mellon University found that just 11% of greenhouse gas emissions related to food come from transportation. Final delivery to the retailer accounted for just 4%. On the other hand, 83% of emissions involved in your lunch today are directly attributable to the food's production.
What locavores forget, or don't stop to consider, is that calculating the emissions over the entire life-cycle process is far more complex than counting transportation miles. Local producers, for example, often store their fruits and vegetables using refrigeration for several months to stretch into the off-season. Certain climates also demand more CO2-heavy inputs, such as pesticides and fertilizers. And suboptimal growing conditions often mean clearing and farming more land to gain yields. "If you want to preserve wilderness areas, the way to go is modern, intensive farming and international trade," says Pierre Desrochers, a geography professor at the University of Toronto.
Large-capacity food transportation, he notes, is often extremely fuel-efficient. "A highly efficient container diesel-powered ship can move huge quantities of stuff ... with a tiny, tiny, tiny energy signature." And when producers do export by airfreight, often their carbon footprint is reduced, since often they can slot their deliveries into the excess capacity available in planes that are already headed where they need to go. But in other cases, the oversimplified food miles argument can grossly misjudge the environmental impact: Flowers grown outdoors in Kenya, for instance, weigh very little, and even when delivered by air, they still come out ahead of European-grown blossoms requiring heated greenhouses (13,300 lbs of CO2 per 12,000 cut roses shipped from Kenya to the U.K. vs. 77,000 lbs for Dutch ones). Though greenhouse gas emissions themselves are often not part of the price of food, all the fuel, fertilizer and land clearance responsible for creating them -- all net contributors to greenhouse gas emissions -- are all in there. "In a global market economy, people have the incentive to use resources as efficiently as possible," Prof. Desrochers says. The steeper the price tag on a bag of baby carrots, the more likely their production came at an environmental cost.
Researchers at New Zealand's Lincoln University, for instance, recently studied how their country's lamb exports stacked up against locally grown varieties in England. Instead of simplistically counting only food miles, they accounted for every aspect of the production process: harvesting techniques, fertilizer inputs, storage procedures and transport methods, among other things. Although New Zealand lamb must travel 18,000 kilometeres to arrive at U.K. supermarkets, the country's comparative efficiency of raising the animals more than compensated for the shipping. A ton of New Zealand lamb exported to Britain could be blamed for all of 1,520 lbs of CO2 emissions. British lambs, lacking the same warm, clovered pastures, and so, requiring more truck-delivered feed and heated pens, rated far worse, even though they were produced locally, emitting 6,280 lbs of CO2 per ton.
When British consumers insist on buying locally grown tomatoes, meanwhile, they're patronizing producers who emit 5,278 lbs of CO2 per ton, produced largely by heated greenhouses, according to a 2005 study by the U.K.'s own Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Spanish tomatoes, by comparison, emit barely a quarter of that amount, the study found, even after shipping to London grocers: just 1,389 lbs of CO2 per ton. Several similar analyses have thrown cold water on the pro-environment argument for all kinds of fruits, vegetables and dairy products.
Having spent some time mingling in the movement himself, Mr. McWilliams' impression is that many locavores ignore the hard homework of actually calculating their food's environmental impact because, at root, the buy local movement often has as much to do with making a statement as it does with environmentalism, or any other alleged benefits. "What I really do see ... is that buying local is a political act. It's a gesture that, in essence, thumbs its nose at globalization," he says. If left-wing posturing and green-posing is your priority, then stick with your 100-mile diet. Leave it to average consumers, buying the globally sourced groceries at their local, corporate, big-box retailer, to do genuine good for the planet.
http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=2318164
Eat Global, Not Local
At the annual convention of the North American Farmers' Direct Marketing Association in Calgary a couple of years ago, organizers offered a seminar entitled "The New Classic: Creating an upscale urban farmers' market with down-home country Chutzpah." For years, local farmers' markets weren't anything you'd hazard to call "upscale," but the rise of the local food movement and the best-selling environmental-soul books, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and The 100-Mile Diet, has made buying locally grown, rather than well-travelled food, as trendy these days among the eco-yuppie crowd as hybrid Lexuses and Baby Planet strollers. "Farmers have been involved with selling local product for decades. What's happening now is that the consumer side is catching on," says Charlie Touchette, executive director of the marketing association.
In Alberta, farmers' market revenues next year are projected to be roughly twice 2004's take; Vancouver's markets have more than doubled their customers, and revenues, since 2005. Although that "down-home country" marketing is key to making shoppers feel the trendy, earthy vibe, with prices often dramatically higher than supermarkets, the big demographic draw comes from the well-heeled.
A farmers' market research report by the Cascade Harvest Coalition, a Seattle-based group promoting local food, concluded that one of the big challenges to markets was reaching "mid-level or second-tier" consumers, who, studies showed, stayed away, in large part, because of affordability.
In part, farmer vendors charge more because they've been suddenly blessed with customers willing to pay more. But locally grown food, in many cases, is also more costly to produce, because Canadian labour and, often, land is worth more than in Brazil or China. Above all, though, local growing conditions for most foods are less productive than elsewhere. Every climate, obviously, has its strengths and weaknesses, and frequently, locally grown food is less efficiently produced than the imported stuff. Accounting for "food miles" -- the key measure used by locavores (local produce eaters) -- tells you how far food travels. It doesn't tell you how much energy -- and greenhouse gas emissions -- went into growing it. When you add that in, and if your aim is to conserve fossil fuels and emissions, the best way is actually to skip the farmers' market and eat global.
"If you are concerned about the carbon footprint of your diet, focusing on transportation is kind of like worrying about the air pressure in your tires of your car rather than whether you have a fuel-efficient car or not," says James McWilliams, an environmental and agricultural historian at Texas State University, author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, and a former part-time locavore. "What matters so much more than how far it travels from farm to fork is what kind of methods were used to produce it."
In fact, farming methods make up so much more of a particular food's carbon footprint, it is remarkable that all those food-mile-counters missed it. A 2008 study published in the academic journal, Environmental Science and Technology by a pair of environmental engineers at Carnegie Mellon University found that just 11% of greenhouse gas emissions related to food come from transportation. Final delivery to the retailer accounted for just 4%. On the other hand, 83% of emissions involved in your lunch today are directly attributable to the food's production.
What locavores forget, or don't stop to consider, is that calculating the emissions over the entire life-cycle process is far more complex than counting transportation miles. Local producers, for example, often store their fruits and vegetables using refrigeration for several months to stretch into the off-season. Certain climates also demand more CO2-heavy inputs, such as pesticides and fertilizers. And suboptimal growing conditions often mean clearing and farming more land to gain yields. "If you want to preserve wilderness areas, the way to go is modern, intensive farming and international trade," says Pierre Desrochers, a geography professor at the University of Toronto.
Large-capacity food transportation, he notes, is often extremely fuel-efficient. "A highly efficient container diesel-powered ship can move huge quantities of stuff ... with a tiny, tiny, tiny energy signature." And when producers do export by airfreight, often their carbon footprint is reduced, since often they can slot their deliveries into the excess capacity available in planes that are already headed where they need to go. But in other cases, the oversimplified food miles argument can grossly misjudge the environmental impact: Flowers grown outdoors in Kenya, for instance, weigh very little, and even when delivered by air, they still come out ahead of European-grown blossoms requiring heated greenhouses (13,300 lbs of CO2 per 12,000 cut roses shipped from Kenya to the U.K. vs. 77,000 lbs for Dutch ones). Though greenhouse gas emissions themselves are often not part of the price of food, all the fuel, fertilizer and land clearance responsible for creating them -- all net contributors to greenhouse gas emissions -- are all in there. "In a global market economy, people have the incentive to use resources as efficiently as possible," Prof. Desrochers says. The steeper the price tag on a bag of baby carrots, the more likely their production came at an environmental cost.
Researchers at New Zealand's Lincoln University, for instance, recently studied how their country's lamb exports stacked up against locally grown varieties in England. Instead of simplistically counting only food miles, they accounted for every aspect of the production process: harvesting techniques, fertilizer inputs, storage procedures and transport methods, among other things. Although New Zealand lamb must travel 18,000 kilometeres to arrive at U.K. supermarkets, the country's comparative efficiency of raising the animals more than compensated for the shipping. A ton of New Zealand lamb exported to Britain could be blamed for all of 1,520 lbs of CO2 emissions. British lambs, lacking the same warm, clovered pastures, and so, requiring more truck-delivered feed and heated pens, rated far worse, even though they were produced locally, emitting 6,280 lbs of CO2 per ton.
When British consumers insist on buying locally grown tomatoes, meanwhile, they're patronizing producers who emit 5,278 lbs of CO2 per ton, produced largely by heated greenhouses, according to a 2005 study by the U.K.'s own Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Spanish tomatoes, by comparison, emit barely a quarter of that amount, the study found, even after shipping to London grocers: just 1,389 lbs of CO2 per ton. Several similar analyses have thrown cold water on the pro-environment argument for all kinds of fruits, vegetables and dairy products.
Having spent some time mingling in the movement himself, Mr. McWilliams' impression is that many locavores ignore the hard homework of actually calculating their food's environmental impact because, at root, the buy local movement often has as much to do with making a statement as it does with environmentalism, or any other alleged benefits. "What I really do see ... is that buying local is a political act. It's a gesture that, in essence, thumbs its nose at globalization," he says. If left-wing posturing and green-posing is your priority, then stick with your 100-mile diet. Leave it to average consumers, buying the globally sourced groceries at their local, corporate, big-box retailer, to do genuine good for the planet.
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