Think All Local Food Is Environmentally Friendly? Think Again.

The lamb example sounds like misdirection to me. This opinion piece is picking apart "eat local" in isolation. "Eat local" is piece of a holistic solution. If you compare industrial scale lamb operations in New Zealand to industrial scale lamb operations in Britain, I would not be surprised that the NZ fairs better. If it didn't, they would not be shipping it around the world because it would not be financially viable.

But if you compare either of those industrial scale operations to a local and polyculture operation, I seriously doubt the same verdict would be rendered. Polyculture puts a constraint on the scale of production of any one food, whether animal or vegetable or fruit. It takes all of these products, puts them onto the same farm in an interdependent way. Lamb waste becomes fertilizer and plant waste becomes compost. Fallow fields become grazing land, etc etc.

The other concerns the article raises are misleading and unexplroed.

"Eat local" advocates — a passionate cohort of which I am one — are bound to interpret these findings as a threat. We shouldn't. Not only do life cycle analyses offer genuine opportunities for environmentally efficient food production, but they also address several problems inherent in the eat-local philosophy.

Consider the most conspicuous ones: it is impossible for most of the world to feed itself a diverse and healthy diet through exclusively local food production — food will always have to travel; asking people to move to more fertile regions is sensible but alienating and unrealistic; consumers living in developed nations will, for better or worse, always demand choices beyond what the season has to offer.

It is not impossible for most of the world to feed itself a diverse and healthy diet. Prior to industrial agriculture, how did the world feed itself? Prior to trans oceanic shipping and the railroad? People still ate. Did they eat bananas? No. Did they die because they didn't eat bananas? Of course not.

And the notion that developed nations will always demand non-seasonal food is also ridiculous. 250 years ago this was not a problem. And just because the generations since 1900 have become accustomed to it does not mean it should continue. The food traditions of the past, the understanding of seasonal food, and food storage and preservation by individual households is not some dirty scandalous past we should all be thrilled to have escaped.

This article is all opinion reshaped with fluff filler and a very vague lampchop shaped example. It does nothing to deal with the fact that any food solution is going to have to use less hydrocarbon energy to be viable. How realistic is shipping lamb from New Zealand going to be when the oil is gone. Is that really how we should spend our resources. And why do those in the UK need to eat lamb in the first place? Their are other protein options, perhaps the British should look back in history for the protein that was most sustainable in their natural landscape before they covered it with cobble stones. (The same can be said of every region of the USA now paved over with suburbia).

I think that a bit of common sense needs to override all the policies. Things like coffee will never be grown in New York so there is no need for me to concern myself with a local option. Instead I buy Fair Trade, Organic to ensure the workers are paid fairly and the fewest possible chemicals are used. On the other hand, there is not one reason in the world to have tomatoes and other seasonal fruits and vegetables coming from around the globe at a time when local farmers can supply them.

The system we have now, subsidizing agribusiness and oil, has destroyed so much local farming that we have lost much of the ability to feed ourselves and protect the crop diversities that local provides. To me the article is one of the many that the agribusiness PR teams float out to create the idea that there is some reasonable way to object to a plan that has no real objectionable outcome except in terms of agribusiness profits.

This would be my point also. And please the example about lamb sounds right. But when the product doesn't quite have the density of lamb for shipping, that and other factors might factor in. And though I don't think it is a factor I did get a chuckle when thinking that New Zealand would be opposed to the world going local.

The other day in Whole Foods I saw kiwi's from New Zealand. I took notice and thought unkindly things. Not sure where that will fit but would seem we could do better in that case. This from the article made the most sense to me:

While there will always be good reasons to encourage the growth of sustainable local food systems, we must also allow them to develop in tandem with what could be their equally sustainable global counterparts. We must accept the fact, in short, that distance is not the enemy of awareness.

Nor is it necessarily the friend.

Right. But that is why this article is misdirection. It does layout any of these additional factors.

There are likely plenty of Americans who are trying to buy local, but in the laziest way possible. They make no attempt to know the farms their food comes from. Make no effort to determine if the "local" the buy means "local big agribusiness", or "local but coated in chemical pesticides" or "local sustainable polyculture" or "local monoculture that is striping the soil."

"Local but Lazy" is not the same as "Local & Sustainable".