in 2003 for the ingredients of a typical meal (lamb chops, sweet potatoes, Swiss chard, carrots, salad, and fruit): one trip to a farmers’ market and the other to a supermarket. Using the product labels to compare the origins of the food, they found that the supermarket items traveled, on average, eighty-one times farther than the farmers’ market items. They calculated that a year of choosing local over imported foods would save a half-tonne of greenhouse gas emissions per household.
Of course, such comparisons carry all the practical deficiencies of any ecological footprint analysis. Things are just too complicated for any straightforward calculation to take all the variables into account. And how far back in the complex chain of production can researchers—should researchers—go anyway? While it’s clear that in terms of simple tailpipe emissions trucking trumps air freight, how much would that calculation change—and how much more complicated would it become—if it included the emissions resulting from highway construction? Likewise, how does one account for the infinite variations in growing methods used across the globe? A totally non-mechanized farm in India certainly uses less energy to grow its crops than most farms in North America. So even if the food arrived here in the biggest fuel-guzzling jumbo jet there is, it could still have a lower energy footprint than its North American equivalent. As a 1997 Swedish study found, it might indeed be more energy efficient for eaters in that northern country to buy Spanish-grown tomatoes rather than local greenhouse tomatoes because Spain’s climate is conducive to heat-loving crops, whereas Swedish production requires great gobs of energy to keep greenhouse tomatoes growing.
Even principles that we might think provide certainty and comfort in this morass of complication—for example, thinking local is always more energy efficient than regional—are not straightforward. A 2001 study done by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University found that a local food system can require more energy and emit more carbon dioxide than its regional counterpart when the trucks used to supply local foods are smaller than the trucks delivering regionally produced food. The smaller trucks require more trips, thus negating the carbon savings of food grown closer to market. In other words, longer distances don’t always equal higher emissions.
Another criticism leveled against food-miles analyses is that they’re too focused on one simple measure—energy—and ignore a whole host of other factors. Any complete accounting of the impact of our food choices would need to consider water use, biodiversity values, animal welfare, labor practices, income distribution, and soil erosion, to name the most obvious examples. And, of course, hovering around the edges of the food-miles discussion are the broader, and arguably much more important, issues of security, sovereignty, autonomy, and control. If we depend on food from around the globe to feed us, can we really consider ourselves to be safe, secure, and sovereign? As Mark Bittman points out in his book Food Matters, “America no longer grows enough edible fruits and vegetables for everyone to eat our own government’s recommended five servings a day.” In other words, we are vulnerable and dependent on factors over which we have little or no control.
It’s enough to make one despair at the impossibility of ever making meaningful, sustainable decisions about what we eat from where. Is there no simple principle that can guide us? I’d suggest that there is one, right in front of us. As we stand in the food aisles, confused by the choices, trying to make good ones, we can ask ourselves a question that goes much deeper than distance and is much more revealing: is it possible to truly locate the source of a particular food and meaningfully determine the details of its production? When we shift our focus from proximity to traceability, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to do the all-consuming work of tracing the sources and conditions. (Who has the time for shopping excursions as investigative reporting projects?) No, what it means is that we determine whether or not it’s actually possible to trace the source, should we choose to exercise such informed control over what we consume.
If this seems like one too many questions at the supermarket, Canadian writer Noah Richler has proposed another, admittedly much more pleasure-ful, principle to guide us, one that I think we could all happily follow. In an essay about local food, published in 2008 in the Toronto Star, he offers this grace note: “the better arbiter is the palate’s common sense.” Amen to that. In the final analysis, we don’t necessarily need to agonize over the complexity of it all. We don’t need to pore over the data of competing studies, wondering if the use of the Weighted Average Source Distance formula rather than the Weighted Average Emissions Ratio formula is really a methodological research flaw. Because in the end, it comes down to fresh flavor, the palate’s commonsense judgement of what tastes best: the strawberry near or the strawberry far? And that is a question all of us can answer for ourselves.
OKAY, I HEAR what you’re thinking. In fact, I share the thought. It’s easy enough to talk about the benefits, to compare homegrown strawberries to imported strawberries and know which one will win the taste test. But there’s something missing and, for me, what’s missing can best be summed up with two words, two words that strike a dagger into the heart of my “let’s grow as much of our own food as we can” enthusiasm: coffee and chocolate.
When I went to see a presentation by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, the engaging writers behind the book The 100-Mile Diet, I felt inspired by their talk, energized by their passion, and awed by their gumption. But I sat there the whole hour with the words coffee and chocolate on the tip of my tongue—and not just because it was a lunch-hour presentation and my stomach was grumbling.
You might have different words in mind—pineapples, cinnamon, and cashews, perhaps—but the point remains. We crave access to foods that we just can’t grow in North America’s climate. Not only do we crave them, but we expect that they will be available pretty much everywhere, all the time. Our choices and desires march to the imperative of now.
Allow me a digression that you’ve probably heard before— probably from a grandparent. And yes, it starts with the phrase when I was growing up. Back then, if there was a movie you wanted to see, there was a two-week window of opportunity at the local cinema, and then it was gone. If you were lucky, it would reappear on television (on one of the four channels) in about a year, but if you happened to be out or your TV’s reception was wonky that night, you missed it again. No videotaping, no downloading, no pirate DVDs in the dollar stores. Or let’s say you found yourself low on cash—at nine PM on a Saturday night. Disaster. The banks were only open during the week, and only for very limited hours during the day. No bank machines or debit cards, and few places took credit.
In short, life—its pleasures and necessities—required planning for the future, taking the future into account in our decisions and perhaps, if necessary, delaying gratification.
And here I will get more grandparent-ish by saying: is advance planning and occasional delayed gratification such a bad thing?
Isn’t it, in fact, one of the grand cognitive features that distinguishes adults from children, humans from other animals? Okay, strike that. I’m sure foxes spend a lot of time planning their next hunt, and kids are masters of scheming ahead for the next treat. But as an adult, human pursuit, I’d say that advance planning defines a great deal of what’s best in us. Just as a lack of advance planning defines the worst. If we were to pick the most dire of global problems, wouldn’t we agree that a common culprit in all of them is an entirely id-directed focus on the now at the expense of what’s to come?
If that sounds like shrill moralizing, let’s cut the id some slack. Because the id—guided as it is by the pleasure principle—suffers in all this, too. Another when I was growing up example, this one food-related and, I’m afraid, rather clichéd. But truly, we really did get a mandarin orange in our Christmas stocking, stuffed at the bottom of the toe end. To me, it tasted better than any candy, and it was a treat I looked forward to all year. It was from a faraway place and we valued it as something special. Now, I’m never without at least one box of mandarin oranges from October to February. I eat them like cheap candy. And, alas, the experience of them has indeed
