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An interesting question came up the other day while I was talking with a group of local farmers who sell food straight from their farm gates. I'd already learned about a sort-of local beer(!) and where to track down buckwheat honey (smells like socks!), so it had been a good night. Then one of the farmers started thinking aloud. Suppose you have a truck full of food product X that drives in from 4,000 miles away. Say the truck carries enough product X for 200 households. Then you take away that long-distance truck and tell those households to buy the product from a local farm, just 25 miles away, buy cheap doxycycline online. Now 200 people are driving 25 miles each to get product X. That adds up to 5,000 food miles - or 1,000 more miles traveled than the food from 4,000 miles away. The farmer's question: Would you still encourage people to buy product X from a local farm.

Strangely, cialis online cheap, I found myself saying "yes." I know - now I've got some splainin' to do. Buy cheap doxycycline online, The idea of "food miles" continues to be a great wake-up call to get people thinking about long-distance food - it was a big part of what inspired Alisa and me to try a 100-mile diet. But it's important that food miles do not become the start and end of the argument. A lot of powerful interests are deeply invested in the current food system and highly resistant to change, and these automatic critics are looking at food miles as local eating's Achilles heel.

The fact is, though, that even when it comes to energy use and fossil fuel consumption, food miles aren't much of a measure. A better bet is what's called a "life cycle assessment," which attempts to measure the impacts of food production from "cradle to grave." Unfortunately, life cycle assessments are complex, highly specific, Buy viagra online, and have been performed for only a small number of foods.

What a life cycle assessment may show can be surprising, buy cheap doxycycline online. The emerging critics of local eating - yes, there are people who have a problem with you and I choosing to buy our food from people in our own communities - often point to the "tomato study." Research for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the UK found that it can be more energy efficient to ship in field tomatoes from Spain than to grow tomatoes in the UK. Similarly, they found that imported organic wheat can be more eco-friendly than local, conventionally grown wheat. Then there is New Zealand's Lincoln University study, which shows that shipping New Zealand apples 11,000 miles to the UK results in fewer greenhouse gas emissions than producing the apples in the UK itself.

Knee-jerk critics use such findings to shrug off the food miles argument and even to dismiss the whole notion of eating locally. Buy cheap doxycycline online, Just look at the press release headline the New Zealand government used to parade the Lincoln U study: "Food Miles Research Good News For Exporters."

Well, not so fast. Those critics are skipping over a lot of details . . , phentermine without prescription. but it's getting late and I still need to cook up some stinging-nettle-and-mushroom cream sauce. Delicious. TOMORROW: Why food miles still matter - and the real reason that sometimes they don't. .

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