Why Food Miles (Don’t) Always Matter [Part II]
APRIL 15, 2007
"The problem with life-cycle assessments," said my friend and systems analyst Ruben Anderson, who has grown a bit of a beard and now looks even wiser, "is that they can only compare systems within the current paradigm."
You see what he means if you give more than a glance at the tomato study. The fine print is this: it compares Spanish tomatoes that travel thousands of miles to UK tomatoes that are grown in gas-fired greenhouses from February to November, far beyond the natural tomato growing season.
Each of the more controversial life-cycle studies makes these kinds of comparisons, pitting unsustainable systems against unsustainable systems. To examine the New Zealand study and conclude that the best way forward is to continue shipping 11,000-mile apples is particularly ludicrous. A more rational message is clear: Britain needs to shift toward less energy-intensive forms of agriculture, such as organics.
In any case, certain issues are moving steadily toward consensus - such as the nature of the problem. As the UK studies acknowledge, the global trend toward longer-distance trade and centralization of food distribution has resulted in a "large increase" in food miles. To give one alarming example, air freight is the fastest-growing mode of food transport, and though it still accounts for just 1 percent of UK food miles, it produces 11 percent of CO2 emissions.
Browse the food-systems studies and another trend emerges, this time linked to the possible solutions: if you want to reduce the environmental costs of your food, move toward the local, organic, seasonal, and vegetarian.
This makes sense to me at the level of lived experience. I know - I know - that eating locally for a year (and beyond) radically reduced the fossil-fuel use associated with my food. Let's stick with the example of tomatoes. Over the past year, Alisa and I didn't buy a single long-distance or hothouse tomato. We ate green and cherry tomatoes in late spring and early summer, field tomatoes in summer and fall, and through the cold months enjoyed the tomatoes we'd canned.
Food miles do matter. They're a shorthand version of the complex energy cycle of food production. More than that, they're a simple reminder of the disconnection between us and our food.
Which gets me back to that Fraser Valley farmer and his question. Why on earth would I tell him that I'd support an actual increase in food miles to get people out buying food from their local farms?
Because we need to reconnect. Because I don't hold out hope for deep, revolutionary change in the food system unless more people begin to remember what real food tastes like, what foods come with each season, who produces their food and how it is produced, what a Brussels sprout plant looks like, how garlic delivers rain down its stem to its roots, how intelligent a pig can be.
To me, that reconnection has to come first. We are talking, after all, about a new life cycle not only for our food, but for you and me as well. Then we start building a local food system with every efficiency we can imagine - because there's no need to settle for each of us driving out to farms for product X. But more on that another day . . .-JBM
