skepticism on food miles
New York Times - August 6, 2007
Food That Travels Well By JAMES E. McWILLIAMS
Austin, Tex.
THE term “food miles” — how far food has traveled before you buy it —
has entered the enlightened lexicon. Environmental groups, especially
in Europe, are pushing for labels that show how far food has traveled
to get to the market, and books like Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal,
Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life” contemplate the damage
wrought by trucking, shipping and flying food from distant parts of
the globe.
There are many good reasons for eating local — freshness, purity,
taste, community cohesion and preserving open space — but none of
these benefits compares to the much-touted claim that eating local
reduces fossil fuel consumption. In this respect eating local joins
recycling, biking to work and driving a hybrid as a realistic way
that we can, as individuals, shrink our carbon footprint and be good
stewards of the environment.
On its face, the connection between lowering food miles and
decreasing greenhouse gas emissions is a no-brainer. In Iowa, the
typical carrot has traveled 1,600 miles from California, a potato
1,200 miles from Idaho and a chuck roast 600 miles from Colorado.
Seventy-five percent of the apples sold in New York City come from
the West Coast or overseas, the writer Bill McKibben says, even
though the state produces far more apples than city residents
consume. These examples just scratch the surface of the problem. In
light of this market redundancy, the only reasonable reaction, it
seems, is to count food miles the way a dieter counts calories.
But is reducing food miles necessarily good for the environment?
Researchers at Lincoln University in New Zealand, no doubt responding
to Europe’s push for “food miles labeling,” recently published a
study challenging the premise that more food miles automatically mean
greater fossil fuel consumption. Other scientific studies have
undertaken similar investigations. According to this peer-reviewed
research, compelling evidence suggests that there is more — or less —
to food miles than meets the eye.
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.
These life-cycle measurements are causing environmentalists worldwide
to rethink the logic of food miles. New Zealand’s most prominent
environmental research organization, Landcare Research-Manaaki
Whenua, explains that localism “is not always the most
environmentally sound solution if more emissions are generated at
other stages of the product life cycle than during transport.” The
British government’s 2006 Food Industry Sustainability Strategy
similarly seeks to consider the environmental costs “across the life
cycle of the produce,” not just in transportation.
“Eat local” advocates — a passionate cohort of which I am one — are
bound to interpret these findings as a threat. We shouldn’t. Not only
do life cycle analyses offer genuine opportunities for
environmentally efficient food production, but they also address
several problems inherent in the eat-local philosophy.
Consider the most conspicuous ones: it is impossible for most of the
world to feed itself a diverse and healthy diet through exclusively
local food production — food will always have to travel; asking
people to move to more fertile regions is sensible but alienating and
unrealistic; consumers living in developed nations will, for better
or worse, always demand choices beyond what the season has to offer.
Given these problems, wouldn’t it make more sense to stop obsessing
over food miles and work to strengthen comparative geographical
advantages? And what if we did this while streamlining transportation
services according to fuel-efficient standards? Shouldn’t we create
development incentives for regional nodes of food production that can
provide sustainable produce for the less sustainable parts of the
nation and the world as a whole? Might it be more logical to
conceptualize a hub-and-spoke system of food production and
distribution, with the hubs in a food system’s naturally fertile hot
spots and the spokes, which travel through the arid zones, connecting
them while using hybrid engines and alternative sources of energy?
As concerned consumers and environmentalists, we must be prepared to
seriously entertain these questions. We must also be prepared to
accept that buying local is not necessarily beneficial for the
environment. As much as this claim violates one of our most sacred
assumptions, life cycle assessments offer far more valuable
measurements to gauge the environmental impact of eating. While there
will always be good reasons to encourage the growth of sustainable
local food systems, we must also allow them to develop in tandem with
what could be their equally sustainable global counterparts. We must
accept the fact, in short, that distance is not the enemy of awareness.
James E. McWilliams is the author of “A Revolution in Eating: How the
Quest for Food Shaped America” and a contributing writer for The
Texas Observer.