So Where Did That Rutabaga Come From? Why I Am Not a Locavore

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

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[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.

I Put My Laundry On Line

I grab four or five clothespins in my left hand as I bend down to pick a shirt out of the laundry bucket. After a few months, I’ve gotten used to this routine. Holding a few extra pins keeps me from having to reach into the clothespin bag every time I hang a shirt or pair of pants, speeding the process along. This is part of my routine two or three times a week now, hanging our laundry out to dry on a clothesline.

Growing concerned about global warming and my contribution with my car, refrigerator, computer, and any other modern device that plugs in, moves, or shakes, I put up a clothesline a couple years ago outside the house that my wife and I live in. There are 80 million clothes dryers in the United States, and it’s estimated that each one throws from 1500 to 2000 pounds of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere every year. Of course that estimate is just that, an estimate. A dryer owned and used by a single person, particularly a frugal one, will not produce the CO2 that is produced by a dryer used by a family of four, but the overall numbers can give an idea of how much we’re warming the planet due to our reliance on dryers.

At the most, we are throwing 80 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere with the clothes dryers. It’s a fraction of the 314 million tons of CO2 that our cars and trucks produce in the same year and another fraction of the CO2 produced from industrial production. It is nonetheless a lot of carbon thrown in the air that would not be there otherwise. Also, those statistics are just the United States. There are plenty of clothes dryers in Argentina, Ukraine, and anywhere else that you have people, a power source, and laundry.

When I first started hanging our clothes out, I thought that this would be a sacrifice, that I would dislike the extra labor involved or the change of routine. I was wrong. It’s a chore that forces you to take your time, like almost all the chores that sustained our ancestors for millennia – milking goats or cows, planting crops – the chores that became part of our DNA as human beings, the work that brings quietude and a feeling of well-being.

Some of my earliest and most pleasant memories are of being in the backyard with my mother as she hung laundry out to dry. I remember when she washed our bed sheets and put them on the line. I would run between the brilliant white billowing walls. It seemed magical to me how, in summer, the air seemed so cool as I raced the length between the clothesline poles.

            I hang up a pair of my pants. I’ve learned that it’s best to hang pants legs down. They dry quicker this way. I haven’t read up on this, but I suppose it has something to do with the way water flows from around the waist and pockets and the way water flows through the clothing as it dries. If I hang pants ankles up, it can take a real long time for the waist and pockets to dry. Long sleeved shirts dry best upside down, with the sleeves dangling.

The wind picks up a little from the east. This is good. Easterly winds come in from the desert. The humidity will be low, and these shirts and pants will dry quickly. I’ve always been as aware of the weather as the next person, bundling up when it’s cold and carrying an umbrella for rainy days. But since I’ve started hanging our clothes out, I’m a bit more aware of what is going on in my environment. Is it humid today? Windy? The weather can make all the difference between getting one or two loads done in a day.

            Dry lined clothes enforce a routine on doing laundry. Before I put up the clothesline, I’d throw laundry in the washer any time of day, morning, afternoon, evening. Now, on a laundry day, I know exactly what I’m going to do after breakfast. The clothes go in the washer, and within the hour I have the line and clothespins all set to go. I get the laundry up by a little after nine or ten.

            There are some disadvantages, chief among them the added ironing that I wind up doing from time to time. I have dress shirts that are “iron free.” When they get tossed in the dryer, they come out looking crisp and rarely need a touch up with an iron. It’s a different story when they’re put on a line. They can wind up as wrinkled as a prune.

            On the other hand, I save some money. I’m not spending a dime on electricity or gas to power my dryer. I don’t have any direct proof of this, but my clothes are supposed to last longer when they’re dried outside. It makes sense. Every time they’re dried on a line they are not being par boiled while they tumble against each other. Best of all our clothes smell fresh and clean now. The freshness stays with the shirts, sock, and bed sheets, so that our closets smell fresher.

            I’ve remarked that I’ve installed a wind powered clothes dryer at my house, and it’s interesting to note that older folks, the ones like me who remember their mothers and grandmothers in the backyard with their laundry baskets, are the ones to get the joke. Some of the younger folks get a vague look in their eyes when they hear me say “wind powered clothes dryer.” Perhaps they imagine that I went online and bought a contraption with a windmill and a generator that I hammered to the roof of my house and connected all of its wires to a sleek looking machine in my laundry room.

            There probably is a company that makes such a dingus. And it is probably marketed as a green product. I would guess that such a device would be a good move, and it would lead to less CO2 in the air. There is nonetheless the question of all the metals used in making the generator and motor, not to mention all the wires needed to move all the electricity around.

            Winston Churchill once said “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” Along with buildings, Churchill could well have included ballpoint pens, space shuttles, clothes dryers, and everything else that we manufacture. Not only our buildings, but all the things that we shape and form into being also shape and form us as well. In a hunter-gatherer society everyone thinks like a hunter-gatherer. In an industrial society we all think industrially. And so for us, if there is a problem, there has to be something that engineers can figure out an answer to, a new dingus or product that does things better, faster, and more efficiently, that will be the answer. Global warming? Introducing the new wind powered Dryomatic, with computer controlled thingamabobs!

            We environmentalists see ourselves in opposition to industrialists and developers. They would pave over the wetlands we see as essential and wreck even more havoc on the mountaintops of West Virginia. We need to recognize, however, that on a very fundamental level we think as they do. We can’t help it. It’s in our DNA. Inside every tree hugging environmental activist beats the heart of a techno-frenzied consumerist eager for the next eco friendly device. Look at any environmental magazine. There will be ads and product reviews for dozens of newfangled compost enhancers, hybrid cars, solar panels, and anything else that gives us a warm, environmental fuzzy.

            Please don’t get me wrong. Our lights should be a low-watt and our cars should not be gas-guzzlers. But we should realize that we are still part of the social machinery of our industrial society, and we are still nonetheless switching on lights and driving cars. Driving a hybrid is greener than driving any SUV, yet you’re still driving something—using resources and putting CO2 in the air—when you zip down the interstate in your Prius. “Green technology” may not be a full bore oxymoron, but it does have a twinge of doublethink to it.

            We need technological advances to better our situation. But there are other solutions as well—when the lights, though they are low watt, are not turned on, when the car, despite its being a hybrid, is not driven, when the high efficiency clothes dryer is not turned on and the clothes go up on the line instead—that require us to consider things differently, nontechnically, nonindustrially. What I’m suggesting is we need to think outside the Prius.

            My clothesline, I’ve reduced my carbon footprint by putting it up and using it. It has also opened up a new area of life for me. Besides the benefits of saving money and fresher smelling clothes, it has given me an unhurried quiet time of day when I am more attuned to my surroundings, a nontechnical and nonindustrial experience that would be unavailable to me had I put up an all new, green, wind powered Dryomatic clothes dryer.