News flash: Don't drive your SUV to the farmers market

And other revelations from the latest big-media expose of local food

Posted by Tom Philpott at 9:49 AM on 11 Dec 2007

Read more about: food | local food | farmers markets | cars

About a year ago, The Economist ran a big article purporting to show that eating locally is actually worse for the environment than typical supermarket fare. I debunked the article here.

About six months later, the NYT op-ed page ran a piece making similar arguments. And I responded again.

In both of these pieces, the authors discovered that in a built environment rigged to grow food in mass quantities, process it in huge factories, and haul it over vast distances, there are cases in which industrial food that travels 1500 miles uses less energy than organic fare consumed nearby.

My response is, fair enough: but we've systematically dismantled the infrastructure required to make local food energy efficient, and invested billions of dollars in the industrial-food system. If we're interested in an energy-efficient food system, let's reinvest in local slaughterhouses, canneries, train systems, distribution points, retail outlets, etc., etc.

Now NY Times reporter Andrew Martin has come up with a think-piece trotting out the same arguments. Here's what his piece boils down to:

Don't drive your sport utility vehicle to the farmers' market, buy one food item and drive home again.

Agreed. I won't.

For story: News flash: Don't drive your SUV to the farmers market
9 Comments | Post a Comment

TAX CARBON!

We need to make emitting CO2 expensive.
I'll say it again.
We need to make emitting CO2 expensive.
Getting food to our tables is complicated. There are many, many factors. We can't be expected to sit down and do out the calculations to figure out the carbon footprint of each tomato. If carbon dioxide emissions were expensive...the free market would do the calculations for us. The energy intensity of each food item would show up in the price. And everyone ( not just benevloent greens) would care.
This is exactly the type of complicated problem (maximizing benefits while minimizing costs) that the free market is designed to solve.

"We are entering a period of consequences."

by Ekirky at 10:20 AM on 11 Dec 2007

just so you know

I never really felt debunked.

by odograph at 10:35 AM on 11 Dec 2007

err

Actually I'm really shocked that, of all the "food miles" conversations I've had at Gristmill, it wasn't those two.

But ... I'm with Ekirky. Tax the carbon and let it all sort itself out.

(Food miles discussions are ultimately a battle of "missing data." No one knows the median distance customers drive to farmer's markets. No one knows the median distance farmers drive to markets. No one knows the median energy inputs for their operations. Pessimists like me can assume that there are enough "stinkers" in those numbers to throw the whole plan off ... but I suppose optimists might just assume that there are not.)

by odograph at 10:51 AM on 11 Dec 2007

It's not YOUR SUV they're talking about

I think you've mis-summarized Martin's recent article. The point he was making (citing Tom Tomich, director of the University of California Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program) about miles was that it can be less efficient to ship food fewer miles if you're using a particularly inefficient mode of transportation - say an old pickup truck carrying a relatively small load rather than an 18 wheeler carrying a whole lot. I don't think it's a broadside attack on local food, it's just pointing out that energy efficiency in transportation doesn't always depend just on distance, and that eating for lower emissions might be a little bit more complicated than simply buying at the farmers market. I certainly wouldn't put this piece in the same category as that Economist article, which made a much broader attack and did a horrible job at it.

I also liked the point about eating lower on the food chain.

Change the world one lunch at a time. Find out how at www.pbjcampaign.org

by BernardBrown at 2:51 PM on 11 Dec 2007

Bernard,

As i can well testify, as long as returns on small-scale, local-oriented farming are mind-numbingly low, yes, your farmer is probably going to haul your produce to the farmers market in a beat-up old truck.

So does that make shopping at the farmers market less "green" than shopping at Wal-Mart, where the semis come in tightly packed over highways maintained with billions in taxpayer cash every year? Maybe.

On the other hand, we could divert some of that highway cash, now acting as a hidden subsidy to the long-haul food market, to rebuilding local food infrastructure. Say all the farmers in a certain area shared an energy efficient truck that would go around and collect everyone's produce and take it to market. Would that not rule?

And so so on.

Victual Reality

by Tom Philpott at 3:26 PM on 11 Dec 2007

Thanks, Bernard

The point is that you can move 20 tons by semi truck which has a fuel economy of about 8 MPG, or haul and half ton in a pickup that gets 16 MPG.

Of course, the truck might being going trans-continental and the pickup only 50 miles ... the NYT article seemed a little trivial and frivolous to me.

What I like about locally produced food is that is isn't a huge manufacturing operation that has all kinds of ancillary and secondary sources of energy consumption - such as cold storage sheds, huge warehouses, forklifts and terminal tractors, and so forth. You pick the goodies and take them warm to market in a small farm truck. If stuff needs chilling, you buy a few bags of ice, no big deal.

The big news I've been reading is that electric cars don't have much reductions if you're getting your recharging power from a dirty old coal fired generating station. That was a shocker!

Onward through the fog

by Sam Wells at 3:34 PM on 11 Dec 2007

A little story about why carbon tax is needed...

We've done the StepItUp march. We've switched our lightbulbs out. We've got a Prius. We subscribe to a CSA. Despite all these changes I find the rest of my family just doesn't get it. Let me tell you why...

Well, first the wife does the shopping, often with two teen agers in tow. So when she get's home, I peer into the grocery bag and start reading the really fine print about where the food comes from. Washington state is best. Oregon slightly less so. California less than that.

I've got all them trained to at least think a little about what they are buying. We've still got a little bit of trouble with boxed snack crackers and snack bars...a lot of packaging for the sake of convenience in my opinion. (My wife's taken to hiding these in her car...kind of like what an alcoholic does with his bottle.)

Getting to the point though, I get home one day this week and found that we have eight of those small yogurt containers in the refrigerator. I read the fine print. Oops...California. Time to quiz the wife and kids.

"Why did you buy yogurt from California? We should be able to get yogurt from Oregon at least..."

"I don't like the type of fruit that they have on the bottom."

Hmmm.... To me, fruit is, well, fruit. Does it really matter to are overall quality of life if a California yogurt has just a little bit better fruit than an Oregon yogurt?

And this is why we need the carbon tax...even those of us who know better can't make the right decisions when it may mean even the slightest of compromises. We need a signal that tells us we're making the wrong choice. So that is why we need the carbon tax, it is the best way to engage Adam Smith's "invisible hand" to create the market mechanisms for making the right choices.

by JeffB at 9:20 PM on 11 Dec 2007

remember social impacts of food choices

Glad to hear you'll be making good SUV choices.
Interesting debate here around the carbon-intensiveness of local/conventional food shopping - the point about loss of local infrastructure is a good one. However - I think another important point is being missed - the environment is not the only thing impacted by our food choices. The social impacts of supermarket vs. local food shopping are very different, and should not be excluded from our analysis. Check out Worldchanging today.
I've also written more about this here.

by edmharris at 4:49 AM on 12 Dec 2007

reasons other than carbon to buy local

I agree with Ed's post above.

I buy local for a number of reasons than just reducing food miles and carbon output (which I agree are important, but just not the only factor). I like the idea of local produce farms in the area flourishing and I think keeping our farms alive makes a community more pleasant. I like that the people at the farmer's market recognize me and chat with me. The food also tastes a lot better and is healthier.

Another important reason is animal welfare. I don't eat animal products myself, but for those that do, buying local animal products usually contributes to better animal welfare, since it means not buying from a factory farm, where animals are kept in tiny cages, given antibiotics and hormones, and transported long distances, often under horrific conditions to slaughterhouses.

Tom, you'll be happy to know I biked to the farmer's market this summer and fall.

by amc89 at 8:42 AM on 12 Dec 2007

ADVERTISING POLICY

You are not logged in. Thus, you cannot post a comment. If you have an account, log in. If you don't have an account, well, by all means go make one! Meet you back here in five.