Eating local, and the environment
I noticed over at Life Begins at 30 that they’re doing the Eat Local challenge again. Their goal is, for the month of May, as much as possible, to eat only locally grown foods. The idea of eating food that is fresher, that hasn’t been bred for maximum durability, that you know where it comes from, is very appealing. Of course, it’s a lot more appealing in May than in November, at least in these climes. (There’s a great Margaret Atwood story in which the protagonist worries that her lover, a Canadian opposed to NAFTA, will "smell the kiwi on her breath" in winter.)
And then I read this article at Mother Jones about one of the advocates of local food, Joel Salatin. I was somewhat bemused by the idea that he made Michael Pollan drive to Swoope, Virginia in order to buy one of his chickens. I’m sure it was a delicious chicken, and Pollan learned something from the trip, but the gas consumed driving down there almost certainly outweighed any environmental benefits.
Last week was T’s birthday, and by trash day we had quite an impressive and slightly appalling pile of boxes from Amazon and other stores to put out on the curb. But would it have been any better for the environment for me to drive around to half a dozen stores looking for things rather than having the UPS guy able to deliver everyone’s packages in one trip? I’m not sure, and I don’t know how to figure it out.
Susan at Crunchy Granola had a post recently in which she asked her readers what each of us are doing to balance our needs with those of the planet. It reminded me of a book I read a while back, The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, put out by the Union of Concerned Scientists. This book argues that there’s a handful of decisions that we make that really matter from an environmental point of view — especially where we live, how much we drive, and how much meat we eat — and that we should pay attention to these choices and not sweat the small stuff.
May 9th, 2006 at 8:25 am
“This book argues that there’s a handful of decisions that we make that really matter from an environmental point of view — especially where we live, how much we drive, and how much meat we eat — and that we should pay attention to these choices and not sweat the small stuff.”
Wouldn’t that be nice? It’s not true, though.
NOt to say that those three things aren’t important; but I wouldn’t say they’re the most important. I wouldn’t even say that there are three things that are “most important” equally for everyone.
(Dammit, another post coming!)
(by the way, I don’t mean to be confused w/ the names that end up here–sometimes it puts Decomposition, sometimes it puts Beanie Baby; I’ve clicked “remember personal info” so I have no idea why it changes. In case you thought I was just, you know, insane.)
May 9th, 2006 at 9:41 am
I see you had the same thought about the Michael Pollan article. How sustainable is a chicken that everyone drives in their individual vehicles from miles around to obtain?
I suppose that the counter argument is that supermarket chickens travel a great deal further, and that the average fuel cost per chicken is higher (even when you figure in all the SUVs traveling 2 1/2 hours to get a single chicken), and that the requirement that you get your own chicken discourages people from traveling long distances. If the farmer really wanted to ensure that the chickens are consumed as local food, then he could enforce a travel zone (I won’t sell you a chicken if your driver’s license says you live more than 20 miles away), but that seems even more absurd.
On doing the local food thing: I have noticed that a lot of local food advocates are located in California. It strikes me as a lot easier to be a passionate advocate of local food when you live in a state with a year-round growing season. Fresh, local produce isn’t available in many areas from October (or possibly earlier–first killing frost when I was a kid was usually early-mid September) through June (I still remember the excitement of the start of strawberry season in late June, back in the days when you could only get fresh strawberries for about 2 weeks out of the year). I see that some people answer this question by suggesting that folks can and preserve their own local produce when they are in-season (I remember giant sessions of cutting and freezing strawberries, blanching green beans and freezing them, making pickles, jam, etc., etc.). However, I don’t think that’s a realistic assumption for working families. It’s so easy to romanticize simpler times when you don’t have to live in them.
May 9th, 2006 at 9:54 am
Gary Paul Nabhan has an interesting book, called “Coming Home to Eat”, on his attempt to eat only foods local to him (in Tucson) for a year. Since he’s an ethnobotanist (collects a lot of wild plants) and gardens and lives in an area with a very long growing season, I think his attempt was less difficult than many people’s would be. One of the funniest parts of the book was his adult daughter’s reaction to his goal.
May 9th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
Thanks for mentioning the Eat Local Challenge. I thought of you when I read that Raspberry Sour over at <http://sourpatch.wordpress.com/>The Sour Patch is doing a “Poverty Line Challenge”. She is going to use the last week of May to combine the Eat Local Challenge with a minimum wage budget. I’m excited to see the results!
May 9th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
I agree about the difficulty of eating local at this time of year–we’ve been doing just about everything with rhubarb that it’s possible to do, but there are limits… And there’s not much else growing around here yet.
Also, did you see the Salon interview with Peter Singer yesterday? He had some arguments against locally-grown. I’m not sure I agree, but it was interesting.
He also argues that you can save as much (or more) energy in a year by not eating factory-farmed, corn-fed meat as you can by switching from an SUV to a hybrid…
May 9th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
Remember the privilege thread? How is eating fresh, local food not a privilege? Think about what’s involved: you need to know where to get it, you need transportation to that place, and (usually) you need more money than you’d spend at the store. You also need to be able to plan meals around what’s available when you get to the market or farm.
I shop at a farmers’ market that is within walking distance of my workplace, so I don’t have any “additional transport costs.” And I live in the Pacific Northwest, where there are good things in a reasonably long growing period and a high premium on eating well as well as healthily, so at the farmers’ market I can get local organic free range chicken (and eggs), pork, beef, lamb; hand-caught wild salmon; local crab, clams and oysters; and most produce (mainly excluding tropical fruits and the like, but including tree nuts and wild mushrooms) at some point during the summer and fall. Plus cheese (goat, sheep, and cow), baked goods, wine, bottled salad dressings and salsas, containers of pesto and pasta sauces (and fresh-made pasta). Sheepskins and wool, plants and flowers, and even some prepared food for taking home and reheating. But I recognize my privilege in working here, in living here, and in making enough money to afford these wonderful things instead of buying cheap tomatoes and fruit from Chile to go with my bakery bread shipped from who-knows-where.
Food transport allows people who don’t live in places with abundance and long growing seasons to eat something other than dried beans and home-canned food all winter long.
May 9th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
I concede the extreme privilege of access to an excellent local farmer’s market, filled with stalls operated by a myriad of local organic farmers. But, it’s not more expensive than the grocery store to shop there, it’s less expensive. Organic tomatoes at the farmer’s market are less expensive than regular tomatoes at the grocery store, ditto all the usual herbs, and whatever else is in season at the moment. Locally ground, cheaper, organic — what’s not to love?
Well, except that to buy the best produce, we’d have to arrive at 7am on Saturday. We just go at 4pm on Wednesday, instead, and buy whatever’s still around after the 3pm opening. Plus: covered playground. Bonus.
Totally decadently privileged, of course.
May 9th, 2006 at 8:33 pm
Here in the DC area the stuff at the farmers market is definitely more expensive than the stuff at the grocery store, with the exception of some things like baked goods or local honey which might be a bit cheaper. However, we still try to support local farmers market to the extent that the grocery budget allows because the cost of the food at the farmers market, although higher, is closer to the true cost of food than what is found at the grocery stores. It’s what food costs when you pay people a living wage to produce it.
By the way, I don’t think Joel Salatin doesn’t want people driving 2.5 hours to buy his chicken. According to the book, most of his chickens are sold to people in the community who come to the farm, local restaurants on his brother Art’s delivery route, or Home Buying Clubs where a bunch of families get together to place a single big order once a month or whatever. The folks showing up from DC in their SUV’s to buy a chicken are much rarer.
On the topic of privilege, I noticed a few years ago that some farmers markets in our area take food stamps. It was advertised on their big banner, and I saw a number of families making use of it each week. I thought that this was a wonderful option for people getting assistance and I wonder if other areas of the country also allow it.
May 10th, 2006 at 3:39 am
VH–the farmers’ markets in my area take food stamps.
Thanks for a thought-provoking post. I’ve just found your blog, but I will be back.
In regards to whether it is better for a privately owned car (yours or Michael Pollan’s) to drive someplace, rather than a delivery vehicle, it’s good to keep in mind that delivery trucks generally run on disel fuel and are much more polluting to the environment than private cars. Jen had an interesting post about this during the challange last August. I also heard last week that private car use amounts to only 20% of American fuel consumption, so even if we limit our driving (and I’m not saying we shouldn’t) there are much larger problems–one of them being the transport of food and other goods.
The thing that I think about in doing this challenge, and in my choices in general, is what kind of environment/community do I want to support. Do I want a world of big box stores, or do I want to keep my little neighborhood shops. If I like neighborhood shops–and I do, ’cause where else am I going to be able to dash out for a quick quart of milk when I run out–then I need to support them and shop there. If I want access to organic produce, or appreciate local farming, I need to support it.
Your comment on the Amazon boxes was particularly poignant to me as I just learned today that two of my local and venerable independent bookstores are closing–one for good, the other up for sale and closed if they cannot find a buyer. If I want these options available to me, then I need to support them (and I do, I’ve never ordered from Amazon–even when my brother worked for the company). Clearly I need more than just me to keep them alive, but I can do my part.
Thanks again.
May 10th, 2006 at 11:22 am
I’m going to argue with Cheney (that’s the old, magisterial, Luke-I-am-your-father Cheney, not the new crinkly smiley grandpa Cheney) that most of your individual choices can be a matter of private virtue but don’t amount to much. Most folks make their choices based on what is convenient and affordable right now, and only if we reorganize society some to get the incentives aligned with what will work in the long term will we get positive changes. This means that a $2.50 a gallon gas tax would be a good thing, as would even more expensive heating oil to encourage everyone to switch out their old bad windows.
But – there’re a lot of US-centric notions that our nation’s actions will control. I’ve even seen people quoting the US-uses-40%-of-the-energy trope. Not true anymore, with China and India each having grown a 200-million-member middle class, with cars to match. Even if we somehow manage to go very green in this country, it’s hard to imagine that all the easy oil won’t get pumped out of the ground and burned by somebody. Our industry is actually pretty efficient, on energy use, compared with that in FSU.
And, yes, I am absolutely SURE that the path to salvation does NOT lie in driving two hours to buy free range chickens.
May 12th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
Yep, Dave S. got it, I think. Personal consumption choices have limited efficacy no matter how virtuous they are.
I read a journal article the other day that argued that meat (cattle, chicken & pigs) coudl be grown sustainably in the US if they handled about half as many animals as they do today. So, perhaps a sustainable American agriculture (not sure about the Canadian #s) would only require people to eat half as much meat as they do now.
But the more interesting question is, what is the chain of logic or of cause and effect that leads from one person or a group of persons consuming less meat, to farms reorganizing themselves in a sustainable fashion? I don’t see it.