Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Those overeducated fools. OF COURSE it's better to buy local, IF it's 
produced naturally and it's in season. Who said you have to eat locally now 
matter how much petrochemical pesticide and mechanization is used to produce 
it? Nobody, least of all the man they're ridiculing. They throw up a straw 
man argument. They ridicule people who drive any distance to shop for local 
food, ignoring the fact they'd drive that far anyway to shop the regular 
supermarkets. The supermarket people (Tesco in Britain) try to make "carbon 
labeling" so insanely complicated people will give up on looking for the 
right food. Of course you don't worry about such things if you're getting it 
directly from local, natural growers in the first place. Or growing it 
yourself.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
------------------------------------------

How the myth of food miles hurts the planet
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/mar/23/food.ethicalliving
Robin McKie
The Observer, Sunday March 23 2008

Ethical shopping just got more complicated. The idea that only local produce 
is good is under attack. There is growing evidence to suggest that some 
air-freighted food is greener than food produced in the UK. Robin McKie and 
Caroline Davies report on how the concept of food miles became oversimplified 
- and is damaging the planet in the process

Mike Small and his wife, Karen, sat down last Thursday to a dinner of smoked 
fish pie crusted with mashed potato and served with purple-sprouting 
broccoli, an unremarkable family meal except for one key factor: every 
ingredient came from sources close to their home in Burntisland, Fife. 'The 
fish was Fife-landed, while the potatoes and broccoli were grown on nearby 
farms,' he says.

Nor was this a one-off culinary event. For the past six months Mike and Karen 
and their two children, Sorley and Alex, have consumed only food and drink 
bought in their home district.

This is the Fife Diet, developed by Mike Small as a response to the 
environmental dangers posed by carbon-emitting imports of Peruvian avocados, 
Kenyan green beans, New Zealand lamb and all those other foreign foodstuffs 
that now fill the shelves of our supermarkets. Each of these imported 
products involves the emission of carbon dioxide from the planes and ships 
that brought them to our shores.

So Mike Small argues that we should eat local produce and save the planet, an 
idea that has obliged his family - and a growing number of adherents to his 
cause - to eat meals of local lamb, pork and a great many dishes based on 
parsnips, beetroots, kale, potatoes, leeks and all the other root vegetables 
that typify the agricultural output of this wind-swept corner of Scotland.

This is the future of ethical eating, insists Small: the consumption of local 
produce at all costs. It is an attitude now shared by thousands around the UK 
and overseas, individuals who have decided to reject foods that have been 
transported over long distances by road, air or sea to their dinner plates. 
They even have their own name for themselves - locavores - and insist that 
their way is the only one to save the planet.

But the idea that 'only local is good' has come under attack. For a start, 
food grown in areas where there is high use of fertilisers and tractors is 
likely to be anything but carbon-friendly, it is pointed out. At the same 
time the argument against food miles - which show how far a product has been 
shipped and therefore how much carbon has been emitted in its transport - has 
been savaged by experts. 'The concept of food miles is unhelpful and stupid. 
It doesn't inform about anything except the distance travelled,' Dr Adrian 
Williams, of the National Resources Management Centre at Cranfield 
University, told The Observer last week.

Given that the food miles cause was hailed only a few months ago as the means 
to empower the carbon-conscious consumer, such criticisms are striking, and 
suggest that some careful reassessment of the concept's usefulness has been 
going on.

Certainly the issues involved no longer seem clear-cut. Consider that 
supermarket stalwart: green beans from Kenya. These are air-freighted to 
stores to allow consumers to buy fresh beans when British varieties are out 
of season. Each packet has a little sticker with the image of a plane on it 
to indicate that carbon dioxide from aviation fuel was emitted in bringing 
them to this country. And that, surely, is bad, campaigners argue. Rising 
levels of carbon dioxide are trapping more and more sunlight and inexorably 
heating the planet, after all.

But a warning that beans have been air-freighted does not mean we should 
automatically switch to British varieties if we want to help the climate. 
Beans in Kenya are produced in a highly environmentally-friendly manner. 
'Beans there are grown using manual labour - nothing is mechanised,' says 
Professor Gareth Edwards-Jones of Bangor University, an expert on African 
agriculture. 'They don't use tractors, they use cow muck as fertiliser; and 
they have low-tech irrigation systems in Kenya. They also provide employment 
to many people in the developing world. So you have to weigh that against the 
air miles used to get them to the supermarket.'

When you do that - and incorporate these different factors - you make the 
counter-intuitive discovery that air-transported green beans from Kenya could 
actually account for the emission of less carbon dioxide than British beans. 
The latter are grown in fields on which oil-based fertilisers have been 
sprayed and which are ploughed by tractors that burn diesel. In the words of 
Gareth Thomas, Minister for Trade and Development, speaking at a recent 
Department for International Development air-freight seminar: 'Driving 6.5 
miles to buy your shopping emits more carbon than flying a pack of Kenyan 
green beans to the UK.'

'Half the people who boycott air-freighted beans think they are doing some 
good for the environment. Then they go on a budget airline holiday to Prague 
the next weekend,' adds Bill Vorley, head of sustainable markets for the 
International Institute for Environment and Development. 'They are just 
making gestures.'

It is not that the concept of food miles is wrong; it is just too simplistic, 
say experts. In fact, balancing your diet with its carbon costs turns out to 
be a fiendishly tricky business. Consider these two staples: apples and 
lettuce. The former are harvested in September and October. Some are sold 
fresh; the rest are chill stored. For most of the following year, they still 
represent good value - in terms of carbon emissions - for British shoppers. 
But by August those Coxs and Braeburns will have been in store for 10 months. 
The amount of energy used to keep them fresh for that length of time will 
then overtake the carbon cost of shipping them from New Zealand. It is 
therefore better for the environment if UK shoppers buy apples from New 
Zealand in July and August rather than those of British origin.

Then there is the example of lettuces. In Britain these are grown in winter, 
in greenhouses or polytunnels which require heating. At those times it is 
better - in terms of carbon emissions - to buy field-grown lettuce from 
Spain. But in summer, when no heating is required, British is best. Picking 
the right sources for your apples and lettuces depends on the time of year.

'Working out carbon footprints is horribly complicated,' says Edwards-Jones. 
'It is not just where something is grown and how far it has to travel, but 
also how it is grown, how it is stored, how it is prepared.'

This uncertainty even extends to the Soil Association, which announced last 
year that it was considering halting its endorsement of air-freighted organic 
food because their emissions negated the benefits of growing it organically. 
But now the organisation has dropped the plan and is to continue to endorse 
air-freighted organic food, provided it is grown under conditions that meet 
its ethical trade standards.

In addition, the government has revealed that it is changing its stance on 
food miles, as was recently stressed by Gareth Thomas. 'Food miles alone are 
not the best way to judge whether the food we eat is sustainable. We need a 
better-informed food miles debate. Long term, the only fair option is to 
ensure the prices of the goods we consume, including organic produce, cover 
the environmental costs wherever the goods are from. We also need a labelling 
system that tells consumers about how the product is reducing poverty.'

Nor is this argument lost on the nation's supermarkets. 'An airplane sticker 
is of no environmental value whatsoever, as studies have shown air-freighted 
products are not necessarily less sustainable than local produce grown in 
heated greenhouses,' said a spokesman for Tesco. 'Thus we may remove those 
plane labels in future. What people are actually interested in is the amount 
of carbon that is emitted during a product's manufacture and import.' As a 
result, Tesco has promised to put carbon labels on 30 of its own-brand 
products in the near future: six types of potatoes, 11 types of tomatoes, 
five types of washing power and liquid capsules, four types of orange juice 
and six types of light bulbs. 'We want to see how customers react and find 
out how it affects their purchasing behaviour,' added the spokesman.

In fact, these carbon cost labels have already been tested on a small range 
of products, including Walkers crisps and Cadburys chocolates. Packets and 
wrappers have a small C with a downward arrow through it, beside a figure 
which represents the number of grams of carbon dioxide emitted during the 
manufacture of that product. In this way it is revealed that packets of 
Walker's Ready Salted and Salt and Vinegar crisps each generate 75g of 
carbon, while the cheese and onion variety produced only 74g.

Now this limited range of products is to be expanded and will appear in Tesco 
and other stores, says the Carbon Trust which - with the British Standards 
Institute - has been involved in calculating how a meaningful carbon 
inventory can be compiled for foodstuffs.

Not surprisingly, such exercises have proved to be extraordinarily tricky, 
says Graham Sinden of the Carbon Trust. 'You have to take into account 
emissions that occurred in the farmyard, for example. Cows and sheep produce 
methane, which is far more damaging a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. 
Similarly, fertilisers produce nitrogen oxides that are also dangerous. Then 
you have the issue of transport and processing. Taking a sheep to the 
slaughterhouse produces carbon emissions, for instance. Cooking is another 
factor. That requires heat that in turn releases carbon dioxide. After that 
you need to store products. That often requires refrigeration, which requires 
electricity, which releases carbon dioxide. Estimating how long a product 
will be kept in a store and how efficient is its refrigeration is not easy to 
assess, but it has to be done.

'Then you have to work out how long your product will be kept at home once it 
has been purchased. You also have to estimate how efficiently it will be 
cooked. And finally you have to work out how much carbon is involved in its 
packaging and how much will be emitted in disposing of those wrappers and 
labels once discarded.'

For some products, such as crisps, a carbon number is easy to calculate. But 
for others, the process will be much more awkward. How can you accurately 
calculate a pizza's carbon footprint when it often comes with a variety of 
toppings?

Even if you could get a carbon label that accurately reflects a product's 
impact on the environment and identify products that have high footprints, 
would you be right in boycotting them? In many cases, such as brands of 
coffee, these products come from struggling third world nations. Using our 
Western concerns with the climate as an excuse to increase poverty there has 
dubious ethical consequences.

In short, the issue of trying to reduce the emissions produced by food is 
bedevilled by complexity. Even replacing food miles with a carbon footprint 
figure will only partly simplify the issues, a point stressed by Tara Garnett 
of the Food Climate Research Network.

'There is only one way of being sure that you cut down on your carbon 
emissions when buying food: stop eating meat, milk, butter and cheese,' said 
Garnett. 'These come from ruminants - sheep and cattle - that produce a great 
deal of harmful methane. In other words, it is not the source of the food 
that matters but the kind of food you eat. Whether people are prepared to cut 
these from their shopping lists is a different issue, however.'

The chickpea: A green dilemma

Chickpeas are sold in supermarkets in two versions: dried or cooked. The 
carbon footprint of the latter is far higher than the former. The only 
processing involved in drying chickpeas is to lay them out in the sun to 
drive off moisture. By contrast, heat is needed to cook chickpeas before they 
are tinned. Hence the carbon gram total for tins of cooked chickpeas would be 
far greater than those on packets of the dried variety.

'That seems straightforward,' says Graham Sinden, of the Carbon Trust. 'But 
you can't eat dried chickpeas. You have to cook them. And when you take them 
home you find the carbon you emitted when cooking those chickpeas exceeds the 
figure for the tinned variety - because cooking small portions at home is 
inefficient compared with that of large industrial kitchens.'

As a result, when the trust system is taken up and used widely, the gram 
measure on a packet of dried chickpeas will include an estimate of the heat 
that will be used in a customer's home to cook them. But that figure will be 
a guess, for it will depend on whether the customer uses gas or electricity 
for cooking. The former is more efficient and less prone to carbon emissions.

As for individuals who use renewable energy to heat their homes and kitchens, 
they would completely negate the point of carbon labels in many cases. 'That 
is why it is impossible to have accurate carbon labels on a lot of products,' 
says Gareth Edwards-Jones, of Bangor University.