The locavore movement, and the associated concept of food miles have been receiving renewed attention recently, thanks to new research published in Environmental Science & Technology. The authors of the research, Christopher Weber and Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University, explain that while eating locally does reduce the carbon footprint of the typical family’s diet, “eating less red meat and dairy can be a more effective way to lower an average U.S. household’s food-related climate footprint than buying local food.”
In other words, production matters more than transportation—with food production accounting for 83% of food related emissions, and only 11% tied to its transportation. And according to Weber and Matthews, the biggest offenders are red meat and dairy, which together account for nearly half of greenhouse gas emissions from an average family’s food.
While moving to an entirely local diet is the equivalent of a 1000 mile per year household reduction, the summary of the study's findings suggests that making other dietary changes can offer even greater impact.
Replacing red meat and dairy with chicken, fish, or eggs for one day per week reduces emissions equal to 760 miles per year of driving. And switching to vegetables one day per week cuts the equivalent of driving 1160 miles per year.
Writing for the Freakonomics column in The New York Times, Stephen J. Dunber seizes on this research to support his attempted deconstruction of the locavore concept.
Dunbar raises four specific arguments with which he challenges the benefits of local food: taste, health benfits, cost and environmental impact. He begins by explaining:
We made some ice cream at home last weekend. Someone had given one of the kids an ice cream maker a while ago and we finally got around to using it. We decided to make orange sherbet. It took a pretty long time and it didn’t taste very good but the worst part was how expensive it was. We spent about $12 on heavy cream, half-and-half, orange juice, and food coloring — the only ingredient we already had was sugar — to make a quart of ice cream. For the same price, we could have bought at least a gallon (four times the amount) of much better orange sherbet. In the end, we wound up throwing away about three-quarters of what we made. Which means we spent $12, not counting labor or electricity or capital costs (somebody bought the machine, even if we didn’t) for roughly three scoops of lousy ice cream.
Before addressing any of his other arguments, I’d suggest that Dunbar is being disingenuous from the start. He claims to “very much understand the locavore instinct,” but his arguments about local food are based simply on having purchased all of the ingredients from the supermarket.
Were the cream and the half-and-half supplied by a local farmer, who supports organic farming processes? Does Dunbar live in Florida or California, where oranges are plentiful, and could easily be harvested into freshly squeezed juice? And can anyone say, with a straight face, that purchasing and using food-coloring in homemade sherbet is not a complete violation of the spirit of eating locally?
I will concede Dunbar’s first point—that taste is entirely subjective, and that the merits of locally grown food cannot be argued on their flavor. But I take issue with his second point, which addresses the nutritional impact of a local diet. He reasons:
There’s a lot to be said for the nutritional value of home-grown food. But again, since one person can grow only so much variety, there are bound to be big nutritional gaps in her diet that will need to be filled in.
Home-grown is not the same thing as local! Has Dunbar ever heard of a CSA? Has he ever visited a farmers’ market? The general consensus regarding a local diet is that food should be produced within 100 miles from the home—not in the backyard, or simply purchased in the supermarket.
Surely organic vegetables, cultivated on a nearby farm or dairy and eggs, acquired from local producers—free from antibiotics and hormones, and supplied from healthy livestock—are more healthful than anything made with food coloring!
The questionable safety of engineered foods are tied directly to the processing and additives it takes to create them—and not just known troublemakers, like the long-discontinued Red Dye No. 2, or even it's safe replacement, Red Dye No. 40, which is likely found in Dunbar's orange food coloring. We're constantly ingesting an array of additives—natural and artificial flavors or preservatives—that make their way into the efficiently produced foods that Dunbar seems to champion.
Whether one actively champions specialization or begrudgingly accepts it as a necessary fact of modern life, as Dunbar seems to, the further away you are from your food source, the less you really know about how it was produced and what is in it.
And the efficiencies of specialization, by their very nature, lend themselves to highly-processed, factory foods. In this regard, even cases where it cannot be concretely proven, I'd personally be more likely to trust food acquired from a local producer than food supplied by an agribusiness conglomerate, via the supermarket.
In his third point of criticism, Dunbar suggests that a local diet is more expensive than one made less costly via economies of scale. Now, if I tried to re-purchase my weekly yield of organic produce from Honey Brook Organic Farm from a supermarket like Whole Foods, I would be spending exponentially more money.
But for the sake of argument I will concede this point to Dunbar. Maybe I don't really need organic arugula, and maybe I can get by with a pint of strawberries instead of the 4 quarts that are sitting in my refrigerator. For the sake of argument let’s pretend that I’m spending more money than I would on specialized food.
When I worked in ‘Corporate America’ and had to send projects out to bid, we had something of an unwritten rule. A vendor can never deliver a product that is cheap, fast and good. A final product can embody any two of these qualities, but never all three.
I'd argue that food from a local source is quick, especially when factoring the time spent traveling from field to plate. I'd also argue that it’s good, though this is arguably subjective if we’re again referring to taste. In any event, it is ‘good’ if you acknowledge the value of whole foods, which I do.
So if whole foods, fresh from the fields are a bit more expensive, so what? It seems to me, that with as much as we know about health and wellness—and the critical nature of a healthy diet—purchasing quality foods is not the place where you want to cut corners with your budget.
And while the initial cost of a local diet might be a bit more expensive, this changes when you look the long-term impact of our food choices. When Dunbar considers the cost of food, does he think about the higher taxes and health-insurance costs he will undoubtedly pay to combat the looming Type 2 diabetes crisis? According to The New York Times, a generation of children in the U.S., raised on inexpensive processed foods, are facing an epidemic:
One in three children born in the United States five years ago are expected to become diabetic in their lifetimes, according to a projection by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The forecast is even bleaker for Latinos: one in every two.
Dunbar’s final argument about the value of a local diet references the new research from Weber and Matthews. Summarizing their findings, he states:
This is a pretty strong argument against the perceived environmental and economic benefits of locavore behavior…
Uh, no. This is a pretty strong argument that we should not be eating beef. If we're particularly bothered by the planet’s poor health, we may want to cut back on the dairy, chicken and fish too. And hey, if we’re feeling incredibly zealous, maybe we should consider a vegan diet.
The study’s findings do not invalidate the ecological benefit of a local diet—they just indicate that other behaviors are even more beneficial. So why not do both?
A local diet will reduce a family’s carbon footprint by 1000 miles. That is an impact. But let’s couple that impact with the sacrifice of red meat and dairy for a single day of the week. Suddenly, we’ve reduced our impact by a combined 1760 miles. If we remove red meat and dairy entirely from the family’s diet, replacing it with local foods, we've reduced our impact by 6,320 miles.
But, you might say, “I like beef!” That’s fine, but behaviors have consequences, and in this case what’s bad for the environment is also bad for us.
Leaving aside illnesses brought on by the improper handling or preparation of food—including E. coli and salmonella—the consumption of red meat is tied to a variety of cancers, cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, bone loss and arthritis.
As I mentioned earlier, while discussing the hidden costs of our food, there are long-term, often unrecognized, impacts to our food choices. Not just the monetary cost of medical treatment, but also in dehabilitation, in coping with painful symptoms and in shortened life spans.
We live in a day and age of instant gratification, tending to ignore the impact of our choices beyond the moment. Being aware of these impacts, whether to our health or the health of the planet, gives us the information to make smarter choices. Obviously not everyone is going to become a locavore and vegan to reduce their family's carbon footprint by the equivalent 9,120 miles. In fact, I suspect nearly no one will make that sacrifice, it’s a fairly radical step. But if enough people understand the impact of our food choices on the world around us, and make smaller changes, the combined result may be enough to make a significant difference.