Buying locally grown foods is environmentally responsible and a good “green” choice, yeah? Not always. A little while ago some researchers from New Zealand decided to look at “food miles” in a more inclusive way - by factoring in the externalities required to produce food in various locations. What did they find?

“…they found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. Similar figures were found for dairy products and fruit.” (NYTimes)

Some scientists at the University of California are also looking at the truth behind local foods, and have actually found that in the vast majority of cases (dense urban communities being the exception) buying from a farmers market uses more gas and releases more fossil fuels than buying standard grocery store food. How so? It seems that the average farmers market is quite a bit further from most peoples’ homes than a grocery store, and people love to drive to get their food (it IS heavy). The extra time spent driving to a market really adds up apparently, and can negate any benefit from the locally grown food, which explains the exception of true urbanity. Secondly, grocery stores may be more efficient than farmers markets because of what I’m going to call the “carpooling principle”. Food shipped to grocery stores gets tightly packed into big trucks, and the average amount of gas used to transport any one item is relatively small. Compare this with a farmer’s market, where every producer drives their pickup truck in from the countryside.

I’ve gotten a lot of shit from “environmentalists” for raising this as a concern, so I just want to reiterate how much I hate dogma. These “environmentalists” have bought completely into the idea that locally grown foods are the be all and end all, and won’t tolerate any questioning of this “pure logic”. Shouldn’t these people be concerned with what is truly best for the world, not what’s chic or “alternative”? Conventional wisdom is often wrong - that’s why science is so important. Now I’m not saying that I hate farmer’s markets, because I love them, or that the status quo of importing foods from California is acceptable. I feel like a broken record, but again, it is the fundamentals that need to be changed, not the products we buy.