I can’t tell you how many drafts I have here on this blog of articles I want to write about food miles and the local food movement. I think about it A LOT. And that’s because it’s everywhere (if you haven’t heard about how many miles certain foods take to get to your plate then your living under a rock. Sorry. Come outside!) Okay, so here’s a good example of a group pushing the local food agenda. Lot’s of publications talk about this topic regularly. And an entire conference last year (which was AWESOME) focused on it.
My problem with food miles is that it doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s a critical part, no doubt. And I think at the heart of what people are saying when they want a local food system is similar to what “organics” meant when it was taking off in the seventies.
From what I can tell (and I agree with all of these), it seems that people who want to “know where their food is coming from” are really saying they want to have trust in the following:
1. That the food was grown in harmony with nature and isn’t contributing to environmental issues. (Food is grown sustainably, doesn’t cause unnecessary emissions or consume insane amounts of energy).
2. That the person growing the food has an honest operation (workers are treated fairly, food is safe, clean, etc.)
3. That they are preserving holistic, diverse farming as a viable, profitable career in the United States and not perpetuating acres and acres of corporate mono-cropping.
4. Reacting to the fact that healthy, fresh food is preferable to packaged and processed “fake food”.
I can definitely get on board with that. It’s certainly why I do what I do. I want to live in a world
where we cultivate more than 33 or the 30,000 types of apples found in the world. Where different areas of the country have strikingly different crops because- gasp- they lie in vasty different ecologically climates. I want to see small and medium sized farmers be able to make a living and I want to know that the food I’m consuming is contributing to global warming, increased gas emissions, soil erosion, and precious resource waste (think water, or fossil fuels).
So what’s my beef with food miles? In short, food miles do a really good job of letting us know where our food comes from and a really bad job at assessing the enviornmental impact.
Here’s some missing information that food miles fail to speak to:
1. How the food was transported. Potatoes trucked from 100 miles away and potatoes shipped by rail from 1,000 miles away are almost the same in greenhouse gas emissions but strikingly different when you just look in terms of miles.
2. How it was grown: buying tomatoes from an area where tomatoes are supposed to grow in an outdoor, sun-drenched area (say, California or Mexico) as opposed to someone in the North East of America buying “local” from an energy intensive, fossil-fuel-heated greenhouse. The actual carbon emissions from trucking as opposed to operating a greenhouse fall in favor of trucking these tiny fruits.
3. Pesticide / fossil-fuel use. Just because it’s local, doesn’t mean that it’s not sprayed with pesticides or doused with chemicals. Contrary to popular thought, local does not mean organic. Not even close. A quick aside: buying your produce at farmers’ markets does not mean organic, although they may use significantly less or less potent sprays. For me, it’s concerning to promote a “local” agriculture system that brought conventional, pesticide ridden food production even closer to where I live (think rain-runoff, groundwater poisoning, etc.)
4. Other methods of production (besides the transit to the end user). Some studies point to the end transportation route as being insignificant to the carbon emissions that happen in trucking fertalizer, chemicals, and other products to the farm for production. Food miles don’t incorporate these “upstream” factors that are costly both in terms of greenhouse gasses and other environmental issues.
So that’s where I’ve landed on the whole food miles debate. For me, singling out a specific piece of the production (final transport to the end user) doesn’t yield a comprehensive picture of what a good alternative system would look like.
Say it!