Food Miles

I haven't read James McWilliams' book Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly. But I've read enough similar reviews to think I've got the idea: McWilliams argues that the concept of food miles only accounts for one small aspect of the total energy cost of producing food. McWilliams is the guy who wrote the New York Times editorial in August 2007 citing the New Zealand study that demonstrated that lamb raised in New Zealand and then shipped to England actually has a lower carbon footprint than lamb raised in England because the climate in New Zealand is more suitable for raising lamb.

Apparently McWilliams also has a good time making fun of the locavores who drive to the farmers' market to save the emissions that are spewed shipping food from distant regions. I've heard several references to McWilliams' book during the past few days, and it's gotten me thinking that we earnest would-be locavores can't keep glossing over this very real question of whether local eating really is more sustainable when industrial agriculture has its own energy efficiencies.

I do think that all of our deeply held beliefs, from religious convictions to political stances, are primarily emotional rather than rational in orgin. That's why it's so hard to change someone's mind through rational argument and so easy to manipulate opinions emotionally. The big picture as far as sustainability and food miles is probably too complex for any of us to understand comprehensively so we focus on isolated facts that support the positions we already hold, like the statistic that a lettuce grown in California and shipped to New York uses more calories in transport fuel than it provides in food energy, or the New Zealand study comparing the carbon footprints of New Zealand and English lamb.

I eat as much locally produced food as I can because I want to live in the kind of world where small-scale farmers can earn a living, where an honest, creative food culture has an opportunity to thrive. There is a consistent historical correlation between small scale farming and broad-based land ownership, democracy and humanist ideals. The democracy in Ancient Greece was cultivated by small-scale farmers and the shift from feudal manors to private land ownership helped to show Europe out of the dark ages. Thomas Jefferson's revolutionary democratic ideal was a nation of independent farmers, and after the Civil War freed slaves were supposed to get "forty acres and a mule," or a piece of land that was synonymous with freedom.

At the Ballard Farmers' Market today a guy bought a quesadilla from me. I was standing by the stove, about five feet from my cash box. He gestured to the cash box and said, "You'd better get that off the counter. Someone's going to steal it." He spoke with a thick New York accent. (One of my people.) In thirteen years of vending at farmers' markets, I've only seen one person try to steal a vendor's till, and he only got about ten feet before a bunch of customer's tackled him.

That's why I eat local food.