Treehugger had a posting recently titled “Eco Diet isn’t Just About Food Miles.”
“I’m a bit worried about the food miles [debate] because it is educating the consumer in the wrong way. It is such an insignificant point,” said Ruth Fairchild at the University.
Whoa.
Food Miles is addative, not a replacement. It is a next step in the big picture of assessing our Food Footprint. Maybe I’ve been thinking of it too inclusively? I see Food Miles as inclusive of all energy consumed between production and consumption: Dr. Jennifer Wilkins, of Cornell’s Division of Nutritional Sciences and featured on NPR’s “Eating Local” a while back, says that 20% of US fossil fuel use goes to food production. Ten calories of fossil fuel are burned for every calorie of food eaten. Like the Treehugger article says, food’s “ecological footprint comes from food processing, storage, packaging and growing conditions.” We are not just talking trucking and refrigeration–production is highly consumptive of fossil fuels and in most people’s minds fossil fuel is processed in miles. Food Miles may be simplistic, as this article claims, but off the point? I don’t think so–on the road to thinking of energy consumption in toto.
OK, the big picture is no where near simple. Lentils from far away may greatly outvalue the tomato from my very yard, which may require so much water to grow that the calories produced are negligible on some environmental scale. And I’m talking whole foods here, not even broaching processed foods. . . . Always, knowing the farm makes a huge difference in knowing how to make choices. We also need to know foods themselves, and ecosystems . . . The point in “educating the consumer” is that we are very far away from all that knowledge and very far away from living by those thinking processes. So I still believe that distance makes local the essential place to start.
That said, I go to the Piedmont Biofuels staff meeting on Mondays–and fossil fuel consumption is always on my mind. When you peel garlic–from, what, 500 feet away from where it was grown?–while you listen to biodiesel production talk, you get biased.
June 18, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Hello TES!
This argument is so absurd that I can’t even wrap my little brain around its justification. Me no smart enouf. Therefore it must be a moot point.
Yahhh local food blog!
June 18, 2007 at 5:10 pm
what’s moot? whose brain is little? you’re a silly grrl.
June 20, 2007 at 5:51 pm
hey I came back again to read your coment thanks for telling me about it. I guess what I am trying to say is that I don’t feel that woman even has an argement here. She babbles a bit about pesticides, mentioning they might come from a disaance but I can’t understand why that is even releviant. I guess my brain is little becasue she is not explaining herself and her arquement on a level that I can understand. AND that i feel makes sence to the arguement tourds local foods. She is just grasping at straw, that is probably not local.
Oh and also we get wondrful local wine and icecream, so she is just wrong! wrong!
I like your goat. Good day to you.
rachel
June 27, 2007 at 5:55 pm
I couldn’t agree more that Food Miles matter…
but, I do wonder about some misunderstanding in the statistics.
I think the quip that 20% of fossil fuels goes into food production would be a high-end estimate dominated by farming inputs (e.g. fertilizer) – not transportation.
The Food Miles themselves may account for a relatively small fraction of that fossil fuel quantity – and increasing the consumption of local foods would not necessarily affect the use of fertilizers, etc.
However, even if only 1% of U.S. fossil fuel use (not 20%) was indeed consumed by transportation of food, that would still be more than 3 billion gallons of gasoline – surely worth targeting for reduction. So with a minor flag over the sense of scale related to actual mileage, your main point still stands!