Just a few blocks from
where I live there is a farmer’s market every Sunday. From nine in the
morning till early afternoon a parking lot and adjacent city street are
transformed into a fresh food Mecca. There are a few vendors selling jewelry
and tchotchkes, and booths where you can buy a cup of coffee or a hot tamale,
but the greater majority of the market is taken up with farmers selling
tomatoes, lettuce, beets, avocadoes, and lots of other fruits and vegetables.
Some things are very seasonal. It’s only for about a month in the fall that you
can find persimmons for sale, and corn is a late summer item.
A
few of the vendors truck in their wares from quite a distance, but most of the
farmers have their farms within the county. The distances these growers travel
are usually in the range of around 50 to 60 miles. There is no set definition
and no organization that sets standards for what a locavore is, but as I
understand it, this food that comes in from local farms would be considered the
table fare for a locavore.
Locavore
dieting has cropped up (excuse the pun) in the last ten years. It seems to have
been spurned on by a study[i]
published in 2001 that found, quite surprisingly, that the average distance
traveled from farm to table for a morsel of food in the United States was 1500
miles. Apples, oranges, pork chops, onions, overall those items were shipped
1500 miles before people ate them at their dining room tables or at a
restaurant. It’s as though every time folks in Boulder order a pizza for home
delivery, they call up their favorite pizzeria in Pittsburgh.
Call any vegetable, no matter where it comes from
Because food travels
less, eating locally is believed to cut down on pollution and the production of
greenhouse gasses. Aside from supporting local, usually family farms, people
become locavores to reduce their carbon footprint. I buy a lot of these fruits
and vegetables from the local growers. I’ve even been to a farm or two where my
food is grown. I now check the labels on produce at the grocery store, and I do
not buy the grapes from Chile or the apples grown in Australia.
But
I am not a locavore.
I am not a locavore because the diet would deny me a lot of things
that I’ve always enjoyed eating, like bananas. The second reason I don't hold to a local diet is that the
carbon footprint of a cantaloupe or ear of corn depends on more than how
far that bit of foodstuff traveled. It also depends on how that food traveled. A follow-up study[ii]
to the one mentioned above found that the large semi-trailers favored by
agribusiness had fuel efficiencies six times greater than the midsized trucks
usually used by smaller farmers. This means that the Ralphs or Kroger
supermarkets that ship potatoes on a semi-trailer 500 miles to your local store
are using less fuel per pound of potatoes than the organic farmer who uses his pickup
to take his wares 100 miles to the neighborhood farmers’ market.
Shipping
food by rail is more efficient than using a semi-trailer, and cargo ships are
the most efficient of all, about two or three times as efficient as rail. The
least efficient mode of transport is using automobiles, particularly
considering that cars are rarely filled to capacity. Using a car to transport
food is even less efficient than shipping it by air. The fuel used to carry a
five pound bag of potatoes one mile by car can fly those potatoes 43 miles by
air, truck them 740 miles by semi-trailer, ship them 2,400 miles by freight
train, and send them 3,800 miles—about the distance from Los Angeles to
Guatemala—by cargo ship.[iii]
A tomato grown in California’s Central Valley and shipped across the country by
rail releases less CO2 into the air than if you drove your car four miles to
your local Whole Foods to pick up that tomato.
I
am not a locavore. I get a good feeling, knowing that I’m supporting my local
farmers, when I buy produce at my local farmers’ market, but I don’t worry
about picking up a watermelon grown hundreds on miles away in Mexico or a bunch
of bananas from farther away. Those banana boats are not warming the planet considerably
more than other ways we move food around.
And Harry Belefonte Can Still Sing Day-O
[i] Pirog, R., et al. “Food, fuel, and freeways:
An Iowa perspective on how far food travels, fuel usages and greenhouse gas
emissions.” Ames, IA: Iowa State University, Leopold Center for Sustainable
Agriculture, 2001.
[ii] Pirog, R., and A. Benjamin. “Checking the food
odometer: comparing food miles for local versus conventional produce sales to
Iowa institutions.” Ames, IA: Iowa State University, Leopold Center for
Sustainable Agriculture, 2003.
[iii] Brodt, S., E. Chernoh, and G. Feenstra.
“Assessment of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in the food system: A
literature review”. Davis, CA: University of California, Davis, Agricultural
Sustainability Institute, 2007.
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