Eating locally has been gaining cultural clout in the past few years bringing with it waves of seasonal recipes in the food sections of newspapers, a slew of popular books on the subject, and the new chic name of “locavore” for eaters of local food; named word of the year in 2007 by Oxford American Dictionary.
While going local has increasingly resonated with people trying to green their food consumption, the movement is not without its detractors. An Economist article in December 2006, which subjected the “ethical food” movement as a whole to a barrage of criticism, is credited for instigating the trend. In August 2007 an op-ed in the New York Times argued that buying locally grown food does not necessarily decrease one’s carbon footprint, and most recently, a February 2008 article in The New Yorker took similar swipes at the food miles concept.
Food miles—the distance that food travels from farm to fork—alone may not be the best way to determine the environmental impact of food. How food travels, and not just how far, is a key factor. Transporting food by airfreight for example, is responsible for far greater greenhouse gas emissions than transporting it by rail or ship. There is also the issue of post retail consumer transport. The combined impact of individual consumers driving to the farmers’ market or supermarket and back can drastically outweigh the lower energy impact of buying locally grown food. Tom Philpott, food editor over at the online environmental magazine Grist, has a solutions based idea on the matter: what if local governments invested in local food systems by means of creating more farmers’ markets and making sure that they are accessible by public transportation? Beyond consumer access, socially and environmentally viable food systems will also require a re-investment in regional infrastructure, so that produce from small sustainable farms can be efficiently distributed to retailers.
Researchers interested in evaluating the carbon footprint of food are turning to a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach that quantifies environmental impact—and especially greenhouse gas contributions—at each stage of production, including growing, processing, packaging, transportation, and cooking. LCA is being put to use by researchers at UC Davis and the Leopold Center at Iowa State to identify “hotspots” of high greenhouse gas emissions along the chain of food production. This process is extremely useful for identifying global impacts like carbon emissions, but it does not necessarily account for the localized effects of the global industrial food system.
Air pollution from rail yards, ports, and diesel trucks at food transportation facilities are responsible for high levels of smog, sooty particulate matter, and increased rates of asthma in neighborhoods where these facilities are located. The neighborhoods that bear the brunt of this pollution and the accompanying health effects are often low-income communities of color. Ironically the food that is shipped through these neighborhoods is often carried right out: many of them lack supermarkets and access to fresh produce.
