In the comments thread of another post, Vickie asks:
I have a question for those of you who have already made diet changes to eat locally produced food. I am struggling here. What should a person eat if they live in the north where the growing season is shorter and there is nothing (but meat) produced all winter? Everything seems to be trucked in from somewhere.
That’s a great question! Unfortunately, it’s also enormously difficult to answer. In fact, a pithy article in Newsweek nicely points up the difficulty of this question—and of the more general difficulty with relying on individual awareness to achieve good environmental outcomes. Local food turns out to be a great example:
Although lists of “what you can do to save the planet” include eating locally—buying food that is grown nearby—to reduce your carbon footprint, the calculation is more complicated than counting up your food’s frequent-flier miles. If the local tomato comes from a greenhouse that gobbled up electricity produced from coal and was trucked in via an 8 miles-per-gallon pickup, and a long-distance one was grown in sunny fields and transported by a 400mpg train, you’ll leave a smaller carbon footprint if you opt for the latter.
You can find several more examples like this in a recent New Yorker article.
Although I’m a regular at my neighborhood farmer’s market, I’m certainly no food saint. And I ‘m fascinated by how local food calculations reveal just how incredibly difficult it is for consumers to make well-informed decisions, even when they really want to. (Heck, it’s proven mighty difficult even for big grocery corporations to figure out the carbon consequences of their products.) The difficulty is no failing of good intentions: it’s that the global economy is terribly complicated:
Each calculation depends on the food and where you live, but studies find that dairy products imported by Europe from New Zealand leave half the carbon footprint as local ones, while imported New Zealand lamb (which is pasture-raised) leaves one quarter the carbon footprint as local kinds that rely on energy-intensive feed. While bottled water from the South Pacific is an eco-no-no, “you can’t say that food from thousands of miles away is [worse for the environment],” says Jonathan Harrington, author of the new book “The Climate Diet.” “Transportation is only one piece of it.”
Okay, okay. I don’t want to make too much out of all this. It’s still true that all else being equal, local food less carbon-intensive than far-away food. And certainly it’s commendable to live (and shop) responsibly — and to think hard about the consequences of our decisions. It’s just that all else usually isn’t equal, and that consequences are often counterintuitive.
The real lesson here, I think, is that invidual awareness—while laudable—cannot substitute for good policy. To take just one example that I’m obsessed with: a comprehensive global cap on carbon emissions would render largely irrelevant the climate implications of food choices. Of course, there are many other good reasons to choose local food. But some of these too would be better addressed with policy than with consumer choice.
Paul W Birkeland
Absolutely true, Eric. The problem is as much in the processes as in the distances.Two things here: First, have you checked out Seattle City Council President Richard Conlin’s Local Food Action Initiative? It is being introduced to committee tomorrow, and will be open for public comment at the City Council meeting Wednesday. It addresses many of the policy issues you mention. Check it out at http://www.seattle.gov/council/conlin/Second, the other facet of local food other than its presumably lower emissions profile is that it serves as a safety net for our citizens in the face of the now inevitable climate change impacts. A diverse, local food network is less vulnerable than geographically concentrated monocultures when extreme weather or exotic pathogens strike. So there are a lot of trade offs here, but when faced with insufficient information, the benefit of the doubt should go to the local food. Local food is uniquely positioned as both a climate change solution and safety net.Paul Birkeland
Stacey
Hi Eric,I spent several years (96-98) living in Slovakia and marveled at how they were able to feed themselves locally through the winter, and for that matter, all year long. Granted, this part of the world is not known for its food but when it comes to eating locally, they take the cake.Each extended family had a garden plot on the edge of town (keeping in mind they have small, dense towns with distinct edges becoming fields, farms and forests.) We often rode bikes to our friends’ gardens on the weekends to help out, ending the day with a cookout over a fire. They had fruit trees as well as a garden plot. Usually there was a large shed for tools and a hand pump for water. The gardens were often watered by hand.Every fall was ‘pickling season’. Everyone would take at least two weeks (keeping in mind the European tradition of 5-6 weeks of vacation per year) to put up the produce from their gardens. They canned a stewed combination of bell peppers, tomatoes and onions which was used as the basis for pasta sauce and soup. They canned fruit and made wine and distilled alcohol from the unused fruit. They stored apples, cabbage, carrots, onion, garlic and potatoes in cellars for use all winter long (caution: some varieties store better than others.)They ate a great deal of cabbage both fresh and as sauerkraut. They claimed it was very healthy and contained a lot of vitamin C, which is in short supply during the winter. They also drank a lot of homegrown rosehip tea for the vitamin C. The lesson I came home with is that their whole society is structured around growing food sustainably. They have the time needed, the land has developed accordingly and the people, for the most part, enjoy it. Those gardens on the edge of town were cherished little hideaways keeping the people connected to nature and to their families. Not surprisingly, the more connected a person was to a western-type job, the more they felt enslaved to these gardens without the choice of letting it go—the stores didn’t sell many of the foods which could be grown making it difficult to get by without a family garden. I’m sure that has changed over the last ten years…-Stacey
jonathan harrington
Sharon Begley’s article addresses a number of prevailing misconceptions about how we can reduce our carbon footprint, including the issue of food miles. For instance, many people believe that products produced close to home are invariably more climate friendly than those transported from far away. Unfortunately, this may not be the case. More often than not, emissions resulting from the transportation of products from the orchard, farm or factory floor to our local market only constitute a small percent of the total climate impact of our consumption. Let’s look at an example. UK based, The Carbon Trust, recently completed a ‘lifecycle analysis’ for potato chips made by Walkers, the UK’s largest snack food producer. In addition to transportation, raw material processing, manufacturing, marketing, storage, consumer use and disposal and recycling all contribute to the greenhouse gases that are warming our world. The study examined everything from potato production to cooking and distribution methods. The researchers found that farmer land use and production practices, energy used for frying, packaging and waste disposal contribute most to the carbon footprint of the product, while transportation accounted for only around 10% of total emissions. Begley does not say that consumers should not buy local, nor do I. Supporting local producers, especially organic farmers, strengthens the local economy, government and community. But we should try not to over-inflate the significance of ‘food miles’ in our consumer behavior. And remember, the only sure fire way for us to reduce our carbon footprint is to just consume less. For more information on how you can reduce your carbon footprint, visit http://www.climatediet.com.
MVP
Stacey makes a great point about ‘putting up’ your own (or locally produced) fresh fruits and vegetables in the summer, to last until the next growing season.One thing my Pacific Northwest grandmother would do, with fresh local fruits, is DRY them in a food-dehydrator. Plums and blueberries are especially good this way.She’d also make tons of fresh fruit PIES and then freeze them in her very large freezer. (Y’all, way up north, could probably just store these outside in a shed during the winter, and not even have to worry about an unexpected power-outage that could potentially de-frost and ruin them!)And, my Nebraska grandmother was especially fond of making JAMS AND JELLIES in the summer, to help get through those long cold winters!Cheers!Michelle
Bill Harris
Does the term “root cellar” bring anything to mind?
Dan Staley
McKibben’s Deep Economy talks about this issue in an entire chapter. In Vermont, his family went thru an entire winter doing the local diet, and after a while eating rutabagas & turnips got old, but they did well regardless.