[Market-farming] NYTimes.com: Food That Travels Well

road's end farm organic101 at linkny.com
Wed Aug 8 19:14:15 EDT 2007


On Aug 8, 2007, at 9:59 AM, nitag at ev1.net wrote:

>  This is from the NY Times and is thought provoking, to say the least. 
> Nita Garcia
>
>  OPINION   | August 6, 2007
> Op-Ed Contributor:  Food That Travels Well
> By JAMES E. McWILLIAMS
> Why imported produce may be better for the earth than local.
>

A quote from the article:

> "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"

But much of the food in a Northeast USA grocery store is grown in arid 
zones. It's grown with the aid of irrigation, and is then shipped to, 
for instance, New York State, an area with a relative plenty of water, 
even when the item's in season in NY. (The irrigation water is often 
from sinking aquifers which are being drawn down faster than they can 
replenish, and/or is itself shipped long distances, sometimes from 
areas where the disappearance of the water is causing other ecological 
problems.)

The failure to notice this -- in an editorial in a NYState newspaper -- 
shows either huge ignorance, or more likely the bias of the author. I'm 
sure there are some specific instances in which a product shipped long 
distances has a higher environmental cost than one bought locally. But 
I'm sure there are very many instances in the other direction. Did he 
try, for instance, comparing feedlot cattle eating Midwest grain, the 
meat then shipped frozen to NYCity; to cattle raised in New York with a 
large part of their diet made up of pastures, the pastures on land 
unsuitable for intensive vegetable or grain production because of 
steepness and/or soil quality and watered by rainfall? There's a lot of 
such land in New York State. (And I wonder whether all the British 
pastures are really that terrible. The research was done in New 
Zealand; did they compare the best New Zealand pasture to the worst 
examples from Britain? I don't see a link to the study in the article, 
so I don't know where they got their basis for comparison.)

There's no reason you shouldn't buy cinnamon from another country 
entirely, or some southern citrus when you live in the North. And if a 
specific example comes out in favor of the imported food, go ahead; 
again, I'm sure there are some. But to import apples from irrigated 
land in Western states, into NYState, while the NY apples are in season 
and are shipped elsewhere can't make a whole lot of ecological sense.

-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale
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