The Locavore Myth
James E. McWilliams, 08.03.09, 12:00 AM ET
Buy local, shrink the distance food travels, save the planet. The locavore movement has captured a lot of fans. To their credit, they are highlighting the problems with industrialized food. But a lot of them are making a big mistake. By focusing on transportation, they overlook other energy-hogging factors in food production.
Take lamb. A 2006 academic study (funded by the New Zealand government) discovered that it made more environmental sense for a Londoner to buy lamb shipped from New Zealand than to buy lamb raised in the U.K. This finding is counterintuitive--if you're only counting food miles. But New Zealand lamb is raised on pastures with a small carbon footprint, whereas most English lamb is produced under intensive factory-like conditions with a big carbon footprint. This disparity overwhelms domestic lamb's advantage in transportation energy.
New Zealand lamb is not exceptional. Take a close look at water usage, fertilizer types, processing methods and packaging techniques and you discover that factors other than shipping far outweigh the energy it takes to transport food. One analysis, by Rich Pirog of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, showed that transportation accounts for only 11% of food's carbon footprint. A fourth of the energy required to produce food is expended in the consumer's kitchen. Still more energy is consumed per meal in a restaurant, since restaurants throw away most of their leftovers.
Locavores argue that buying local food supports an area's farmers and, in turn, strengthens the community. Fair enough. Left unacknowledged, however, is the fact that it also hurts farmers in other parts of the world. The U.K. buys most of its green beans from Kenya. While it's true that the beans almost always arrive in airplanes--the form of transportation that consumes the most energy--it's also true that a campaign to shame English consumers with small airplane stickers affixed to flown-in produce threatens the livelihood of 1.5 million sub-Saharan farmers.
Another chink in the locavores' armor involves the way food miles are calculated. To choose a locally grown apple over an apple trucked in from across the country might seem easy. But this decision ignores economies of scale. To take an extreme example, a shipper sending a truck with 2,000 apples over 2,000 miles would consume the same amount of fuel per apple as a local farmer who takes a pickup 50 miles to sell 50 apples at his stall at the green market. The critical measure here is not food miles but apples per gallon.
The one big problem with thinking beyond food miles is that it's hard to get the information you need. Ethically concerned consumers know very little about processing practices, water availability, packaging waste and fertilizer application. This is an opportunity for watchdog groups. They should make life-cycle carbon counts available to shoppers.
Until our food system becomes more transparent, there is one thing you can do to shrink the carbon footprint of your dinner: Take the meat off your plate. No matter how you slice it, it takes more energy to bring meat, as opposed to plants, to the table. It takes 6 pounds of grain to make a pound of chicken and 10 to 16 pounds to make a pound of beef. That difference translates into big differences in inputs. It requires 2,400 liters of water to make a burger and only 13 liters to grow a tomato. A majority of the water in the American West goes toward the production of pigs, chickens and cattle.
The average American eats 273 pounds of meat a year. Give up red meat once a week and you'll save as much energy as if the only food miles in your diet were the distance to the nearest truck farmer.
If you want to make a statement, ride your bike to the farmer's market. If you want to reduce greenhouse gases, become a vegetarian.
James E. McWilliams, the author of Just Food, is an associate professor of history at Texas State University.
Tracey Bianchi says:
As someone who dashes off the the Farmer's Market every chance I get, these are indeed some eye opening thoughts. But I have one question about food miles and quality. When I buy my blueberries at the market, I buy them from local farmer who picked them no longer than two days before the market (at least this is his claim). My understanding of the food world is that the sooner you eat a picked product, the greater its nutritional value.
What you say about food miles seems to make sense. But for two reasons a farmer's market still seems to make more sense to me. The first is the freshness of the food and the second is the ethos of the place. An open air setting, no electricity, registers, baggers, clerks, stickers, carts, or enormous air conditioned grocery store. Even if the food miles are the same, it still seems best to shop the market for these reasons. What are your thoughts?
Adam W. says:
The farmers market also has one big advantage not mentioned in this article - that it helps reconnect people to the food that they eat. In modern life, we have become so detached from our food that many people have no idea what part of an animal they are eating when they eat a steak, or even what many fruits and vegetables look like in the wild.
While no one literally thinks that meat is grown directly inside the packaging they buy it in at the supermarket, that packaging does help divorce people from the reality that an animal had to give its life so they could eat that steak.
The closer we can get the the reality of what our food is and where it comes from, the better we will all eat.
Adam W. says:
We are clearly shopping at different farmers markets - to me the whole fun of the place is that I can't get the farmers to shut up about every aspect of their food. I love hearing all about it, and why one farmers produce is different from another's. I guess it is a bummer that for whatever reasons the farmers and butchers in your area need to hire people who don't actually work on the farm to go out and sell their wares.
Elli A. says:
"This is an opportunity for watchdog groups. They should make life-cycle carbon counts available to shoppers."
Amen. And once we have it, we should tax it.
Realistically something like that will only be possible for big manufacturers. Small manufacturers will probably not be able to support such bureaucracy. This can give the big manufacturers an unfair advantage. And don't forget stuff that comes from overseas. In some cases you can expect the reported amount of carbon to be as accurate as the reported amount of lead in toys :)