"Local-vorism" Takes a Hit?

Recently, the concept of “food miles”, or the distance your dinner traveled from farm to plate, has taken a beating. Writing in the New York Times, James E. McWilliams put his finger on an increasingly spreading pulse, that more people are paying attention to where their food came from and how far it traveled as a simple, individual act to reduce their environmental impact.

Certainly the image of nectarines traveling via jet from Chile to Stop & Shop in January should strike us as wasteful, and downright seasonally inappropriate. Regrettably, McWilliams moved on to shred the good intentions of many of us who try to eat local, by pointing out that sometimes the carbon footprint of a local food is significantly weightier than the same substance shipped from thousands of miles away. By way of example he offered a recent study conducted in New Zealand on the commodity of lamb: either grown locally (in this case the UK) or shipped 11K miles from New Zealand. The simple arithmetic of his argument was that the UK lambs were raised on feed – a resource intensive practice. Meanwhile, the New Zealand lambs spent their young lives in the verdant and certainly never-irrigated hillsides of their country. Running the numbers, the study found that the UK lamb had racked up 6280 pounds of CO2 per ton, while the New Zealand lamb, traveling to the same plate, topped out at a mere 1520.

So what is an environmentally sensitive epicurean to do? Suddenly, one of our most beloved justifications for local, slow, organic etc. has been skewered. Mr. McWilliams cites the reasons for eating locally as being “freshness, purity, taste” and makes gestures to “community cohesion and preserving open space.” But here are some mathematical gymnastics he might have added to the equation:

Eating locally supports the diversity and vigor of your local economy. When city folk meet the folks who grow their food at markets and U-Pick spots all over New England, we are reminded that food comes from the attentive labor of actual people, not boxes stamped “Dole”, or plastic clamshells. The dollars that go from your wallet into the hands of local farmers go right back into local businesses, taxes, schools, roads – you name it. And more to the point – you live in it.

Eating from local farms promotes the biodiversity of your immediate ecosystem. Smaller farms have to diversify their offerings in order to stay in the game – to only produce a mono-crop (like corn) small and medium acreage producers would quickly be squeezed out. Smaller scale organic farms produce scores of different species and subspecies, which in turn support the biodiversity of the animal kingdom – especially our threatened and crucial pollinators and songbirds.

Similarly, eating from local farms improves air, soil, and water quality. When food travels just a short distance our air benefits. When crops are raised sustainably, both soil and water quality improve. And these affect everyone in the foodshed area – not just those buying the fantastic organic veggies, locally crafted cheeses, and heritage breeds of meat. Furthermore, how concerned is the typical grocery store shopper about the effect on the air, water, or soil of a peach grown on the other side of the world? But if pesticide use is affecting your air, or driving your childhood asthma rates through the roof, you are more likely to care, to do something about it, and to change your consumer habits to reflect your concerns.

The actions these circumstances inspire put a big, and undeniable, dent into our use of fossil fuel. Stephen L Hopp, writing with his wife Barbara Kingsolver in their collaboration Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, cites the impact that every family in America eating just one meal a week of local, organically raised produce and meats could have: reducing our fuel use by 1.1 million barrels of oil each week this delicious practice goes on...

In a final note on his fuzzy math skills, Mr. McWilliams chose as his example one of the most resource intensive foods we have on offer – meat. I wonder if his analysis would be quite so compelling when comparing an apple flown from New Zealand to the Honeycrisp apple that is on sale at your farmers’ market right now, this week. Go out and get a few. Your community, your air, your water table, the bees and birds and the earth will all thank you. So will your taste buds.