Our Kind of Person: Joel Salatin
Read this article and you'll see why.The issue of "food miles" is the "new organic" -- an issue that is creeping its way into mainstream public consciousness. OK, so maybe Mother Jones magazine and Palatin (a self-described “Christian libertarian environmentalist lunatic farmer”) aren't exactly indicative of mainstream American opinions, but in Europe, people are legitimately starting to think not only about what goes into their food, but how far it has to travel to get to them.
Those of you who have been following our efforts here at the Bistrot know that we've been banging the local food drum for several years now. Who wants to join in?
posted by Alex Maws @ 3:47 PM
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A few academics have been researching the "food miles" issue for about a decade now. Two examples below. There is definitely a serious tradeoff to be considered -- transportation impacts -- if organics are bought from distant suppliers. As Tony points out, you can avoid having to make those tradeoffs if you buy locally grown organics. But I don't think most of those trying to "do the right environmental think" contemplate that this tradeoff suggests that, for those who don't have access to locally grown organics, there will very likely be cases where the environmental impacts of buying locally grown conventional foods will be less than organic foods imported from far-away suppliers. Comparisons are complex, especially because some of the environmental impacts of fertilizer and pesticide use can't easily be compared to the environmental impacts of fossil fuel combustion.
For those interested in some academic case studies of a yogurt cup and apples, see below. I believe the yogurt study is the first rigorous life-cycle assessment study on this topic.
"The well-travelled yogurt pot: lessons for new freight transport policies and regional production", by S. Bge (1995) World Transport Policy and Practice, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 7-11.
This article follows the transportation of all the ingredients that go into a yogurt cup bought in Germany. It concludes "Eight thousand kilometres of roads are used for producing and distributing the examined yogurt. If one 150g strawberry yogurt is purchased in a supermarket in southern Germany, it will have been responsible for moving one lorry [truck] over 9.2 metres. So-called 'environmental' products are not environmental if the distances are included."
"An Environmental Assessment of Food Supply Chains: A Case Study on Dessert Apples", by Andy Jones (2002), Environmental Management, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 560-576.
This article concludes "transportation is now responsible for a considerable fraction of the total energy consumption in the life cycle of fresh apples, and in most cases exceeds the energy consumed in commercial apple cultivation. By developing local production and marketing systems for fresh products, transport demand can be reduced and many of the environmental impacts associated with existing supply chains can be avoided."
Having just come back from a year abroad in London, I can indeed confirm that "food miles" in the UK are a current issue, with much coverage in the national press. Thank goodness for countries that are more concerned about the environment than we are in the US...now if only we could get a clue.
Thanks, Chef Tony, for talking about this -- let's hope more people in the food world jump on the bandwagon (which is of course an electric hybrid, that wagon!) :-)
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