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  • From: road's end farm <organic101 AT linkny.com>
  • To: nitag AT ev1.net, Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] NYTimes.com: Food That Travels Well
  • Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2007 19:14:15 -0400


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

<x-tad-smaller> OPINION </x-tad-smaller>
  <x-tad-smaller>| August 6, 2007</x-tad-smaller>
<x-tad-bigger>Op-Ed Contributor:  Food That Travels Well </x-tad-bigger><x-tad-bigger> </x-tad-bigger>
<x-tad-smaller>By JAMES E. McWILLIAMS</x-tad-smaller>
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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