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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Does It Really Matter Whether Your Food Was Produced Locally?
  • Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:44:07 -0700


Does It Really Matter Whether Your Food Was Produced Locally?
Counting food miles can lead to wrong turns: Instead of worrying about how
far our food has traveled we should look at the way it's produced and hauled.
February 19, 2010 |
http://www.alternet.org/food/145673/does_it_really_matter_whether_your_food_was_produced_locally

The local wits in Salina, Kansas, like to say the easiest way to for us "eat
locally" around here is to heat up a Tony's® frozen pizza. It's not just that
Tony's has a large plant on the west side of town. Salina is also surrounded
by wheat fields and is home to a large flour mill. Our local pizza, at least
theoretically, could be assembled on a local crust.

But our hometown pizza can be considered local only if we ignore the many
miles ingredients like tomato sauce, cheese, pork and beef travel to reach
the plant. To that should be added the highway or rail miles logged by the
cattle and hogs who gave their lives for the pizza; the distances that feed
grains and soybean meal traveled to reach the feedlots, dairy farms and
hog-confinement facilities where the animals were raised; the trips that
tomatoes took to the sauce factory, and the miles that fertilizers and other
inputs were hauled to reach the fields where the tomatoes were grown.

We eat lots of high-mileage meals. In 1997, the distance traveled by an
average food item from its site of production to the average U.S. grocery
store (counting only the delivery distance, not the transportation involved
in production) was 980 miles. In the next few years, food imports shot up
dramatically; as a result, by 2004, the average food item was traveling 1,230
miles.

That is widely viewed as an undesirable, if not absurd, situation. The
Seattle Times, for instance, advises, "Transportation of food requires
copious amounts of fossil fuels and other resources that contribute to global
warming and pollution, so the lower the food mileage we rack up, the better."

In a report stressing the need for more localized food, Iowa State
University's Leopold Center analyzed two healthful vegetarian dinners
consisting of rice, stir-fried vegetables and salad. The first was prepared
with ingredients from a family garden, a farmers' market, and a food co-op;
the second was put together from fresh, store-bought ingredients. Adding up
the lengths of trips taken by all 13 ingredients from farm to kitchen, the
first meal--despite efforts to localize--had logged 3,445 miles. It scored
well, however, compared with the second, conventionally prepared meal, which
had traveled 22,100 miles--circling the earth, figuratively speaking. But
does that Iowa meal teach a useful lesson about the national or global food
system? In other words ....

Do Food Miles Even Matter?

With rising demand for localization of food production, the concept of "food
miles"-- first formulated in the early 1990s and generally understood as the
sum of miles a given quantity of food travels from the point of production to
the point of final sale or consumption -- remains a popular indicator of
sustainability. A quick news search last week turned up 70 articles in the
previous month that included the term "food miles."

Reducing food miles, local-food advocates argue, will not only reduce carbon
emissions by shrinking transportation networks but will also help ensure that
food is produced more responsibly and is of high quality. Although food from
nearby sources is desirable for many such reasons, research over the past few
years has shown that simply calculating food miles in the absence of other
information does not capture the complexity of the food system in a way that
is useful to the well-intentioned eater.

In a much-cited 2008 paper (pdf), Christopher Weber and Scott Matthews of
Carnegie-Mellon University calculated that per U.S. household, the shipping
of food from farms to retail outlets racks up 3,000 ton-kilometers per year
(which could be accumulated by any combination of weight and distance -- for
example, by hauling three metric tons of food 1,000 kilometers). This is what
they called the "final delivery" leg of the food chain, the part normally
used in calculations of food miles.

But, say Weber and Matthews, we should also take into account food
production, which requires that other materials (for example, fertilizer,
fuel and animal feed) be hauled a total of another 9,000 ton-kilometers per
year per household! In sum, transportation for production plus delivery comes
to 12,000 ton-kilometers annually. That consumes a lot of energy and produces
a lot of greenhouse emissions; however, transportation has far from the
biggest climate clout in the food business. Final-delivery food miles, the
focus of many localization efforts, account for only 4 percent of the food
system's total emissions.





  • [Livingontheland] Does It Really Matter Whether Your Food Was Produced Locally?, Tradingpost, 02/23/2010

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