I've been enjoying this site. A thanks to geneusutwerk for introducing me to it. This is an interesting take on the perception vs the reality of the environmental impact of local vs non-local food sourcing.
I'm no expert, but aren't there other reasons that local food is a good idea, at least for foods that can be grown locally (e.g. there's no such thing as a Michigan banana)? For example, there are a lot of community gardens around my neighborhood. They make the place so much more pleasant, IMO, because it turns an abandoned lot into a well manicured space with lots of different types of plants. The argument that urban farms disaggregate populations is specious, because it's typically only already unused space that is used for gardening in the first place. No one is buying high priced real estate to turn into a garden. Also, lots of perishable food can only be grown locally. Some varieties of tomatoes that taste quite a bit better do not ship well. Therefore, aggregating all agriculture would kill a lot of otherwise desirable food. Lastly, there is some (difficult to quantify) value in knowing a bit about where your food originates from. I'm not arguing with the calculus of CO2 emissions; I've seen several reports that support the argument that local foods can be more CO2 intensive. But I think there are other factors besides CO2 that matter. I think if we quit a lot of the vast farm subsidies, then greenhouse gas emissions would drop enough (by the rising price of meat that would be inevitable) to offset those emission created by the limited number of people who drive the local food movement.
"I want a Michigan banana." That's what she said. Also, my local Metro-Detroit farmer's market (Clarkston) has broccoli, kale, tomatoes, squash, and even organic chicken and beef that are far better than anything I can get without driving a half-hour, or better, round-trip to a specialty store.
My family and I take every advantage of walking to the market (saving some CO2 emissions in the process) whenever it's open.
It sounds as though for you, buying food locally is about quality and convenience and not about ecology. I think there is more to why people buy locally than is emphasized in this piece. I don't think it is "primarily about environmental impacts," for most people but it's about eating good stuff.
Reasons I can think of off the top of my head why I want to buy local food (none really have anything to do with the carbon footprint): * want to support local businesses and small farms * (hand in hand) don't want to support "Big Farma" * want to know what is in my food and what my food is treated with, find it a LOT easier to find this information out if you talk to the person who grew your food as opposed to go to a supermarket * a day at a farmer's market is a much more enjoyable and engaging experience than an hour or two in a grocery store! * tying in with the above, want to feel connected to my local community * the opportunity for learning is endless! go talk to a farmer. seriously. go do it. ask him about soil composition and nitrate and "how does this work?" and "what kind of problems do you experience with x crop?" buying from a local farmer has a potential to build a relationship and gain some interesting, job-specific knowledge that most people don't have anymore. * want to be able to experience foods, or types of foods, that I can't get from "Big Farma" or a supermarket and maybe can't grow on my own, like heirloom tomatoes for instance or - see that apple article? how about a different kind of apple than the popular 5? Frankly, I had never considered carbon footprint as a reason for why I believe it's beneficial to try to eat locally.
I often find it difficult to agree with other peoples footprint calculations. To me, the embodied energy of a commodity is nearly impossible to accurately calculate because many different infrastructures are so tighlty linked together, it gets difficult to divide and sort. I mean sure a tomato is shipped into the city in bulk, but the distribution doesn't end there because it still arrives locally on smaller runs which involves a lot of trips by a lot of trucks. It isn't like a train is backing up to your local foodmart and unloading tons of food. Not to mention, these large trucks and distribution centers are often refrigerated which ups their energy consumption plenty. Regarding specialization, sure some things grow better in some places, but we often end up with a homogenous product that way. There are literally thousands of tomato varietals, but how many end up in the market? Industrial farming is anti-diversity. And we end up with places like Almeria, Spain: Costa del Polythene.
i wonder where geneusutwork found the site? ;) anyways, i'm really disappointed in this article. the local food movement is not entirely about carbon. bruening is pretty good sometimes but he has a frustrating habit of occasionally going after strawmen.
By bad, I ought to give credit where credit is due :) As for Bruenig, the guy seems to be cranking out pieces and for that type of pace the writing is good and the topics are interesting. So, yeah... thanks to YOU for the introduction. Aside: What I've noticed with blogs/bloggers is that either they take way too long between posts (ahem... cW and StJohn) but the writing is great, or they write often and the work is shoddy. It's nice to find one that can have a good pace and produce material I enjoy reading. I think theadvancedapes does a nice job of that.
Any other suggestions?
a lot of the blogs i watch are very low-volume, i just make up for it by subbing lots of them in my aggregator. i watch several other aggregation sites including reddit, hackernews, metafilter, and slashdot. there's a few major blogs/magazines that post weekly "tl;dr" lists, and those are another major source of content for me. anything that i might suggest, i certainly post, so just keep followin me ;)
I don't think he ever presents it as being "entirely about carbon." Here is the first sentence There is a movement of people who really want people to eat food that is produced locally. Their argument seems to be primarily about the environmental impacts of moving food long distances.
I think he has a point here. If you were to talk to a champion of the local food "movement" and ask them why it's important, I would guess this would be the first reason given. It's not the only drum they beat, but it's often the one that's beat on the loudest. -From my experience.
The first reason given would be environmental impact. The second reason given would be the local economy. the third reason given would be food security. And all of these reasons would be accompanied by attribution and further discussion. None of this "silly people, the thousand-mile caesar salad is good for CONSUMPTION! CONSUME CONSUME CONSUME!
The fuck. This is a giant stack of groundless assertions masked as data points in order to support an allegation that has no basis in reality. ...because gas taxes have handled this so well. Has this fuck priced diesel lately? Right. When everyone in Los Angeles lost their service-sector job in 2008 and didn't need to commute from West Covina to Malibu twice a day any longer, traffic didn't get better because more people weren't staying home, they were driving around in circles for no good goddamn reason. That's exactly what happened. The notion that "you should sell your produce as close to your farm as possible" is expounded upon at length in Ten Acres Enough, which was written in 1864. "Carbon tax." Whatever. Yup. When the DVD came out, all those cheap VCRs on the shelves were snapped up by... Let's not pretend that food isn't shipped by the truckload and that one semi-trailer worth of lettuce driven a mile doesn't use half the gas of two semi-trailers worth of lettuce driven a mile. ...but the infrastructure in North America transports food primarily by surface so what the fuck's your point? So wait a sec - y'all were all "OMG THERE'S MORE THAN FIVE KINDS OF APPLE ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG" yesterday but today you're all "whoa! Food specialization is impossible with local food!" Srsly? seven fucking shares for this drivel? Where's my "block mattbruenig.com" button @mk?@First, charging for carbon emissions will solve the problem more comprehensively.
In particular, if the local food movement manages to reduce carbon emissions in food production because it reduces fuel consumption, that will just free up the saved fuel to be used elsewhere.
Reducing demand will, in all likelihood, just cause the price of fossil fuels to fall, which will lead to others buying up and using the fuels for other purposes.
For instance, suppose John drives 1 lbs of tomatoes 1 mile to the farmer’s market. Now suppose, Sally drives 3 lbs of tomatoes 2 miles to the farmer’s market. John’s food has fewer food miles, but Sally’s food has less miles per unit of food and, all else equal, less emissions per unit of food.
Moving a unit of food by train is way less fuel-intensive than moving it by road vehicle for instance.
Third, local food flies in the face of specialization and the kinds of gains it allows.
So what you're saying is you weren't a fan of the piece? :) I posted it because I have a number of friends/family that are REALLY involved in the whole local movement, so much so that one of them quit a high paying marketing gig in Chicago to move to rural Michigan and become a farmer. As I mentioned below, one of the the things that is most often pointed to as a major benefit from the local movement is that it saves from all the fuel costs of sending a truck from mexico to the midwest so we can all have tomato's year round. I hear this often. But it's not that simple and it shouldn't be painted as such. The paragraph I enjoyed and planned to share with said family/friends is this one: Alright, gotta run. I have to drive 4 hours for a 30 minute meeting. Talk about inefficient fuel usage!Second, even if we ignore point one, food being local does not necessarily tell us anything about its overall carbon footprint. Activists within the movement talk often of food miles under the assumption that the farther food travels to get to you, the more emissions it contributes. This is obviously wrong. For instance, suppose John drives 1 lbs of tomatoes 1 mile to the farmer’s market. Now suppose, Sally drives 3 lbs of tomatoes 2 miles to the farmer’s market. John’s food has fewer food miles, but Sally’s food has less miles per unit of food and, all else equal, less emissions per unit of food.
It's a point not often considered by those I've interacted with on the topic.Srsly? seven fucking shares for this drivel?
I think people tend to share as much for the ensuing conversation as they do the piece that inspired it. I've shared posts that you've commented on just because of your comments, without actually having read the piece. I'd have shared this piece solely for the sounds_sound comment with the link to Costa del Polythene. But, to answer your question about how to block, if you are in your feed you will see the name of the domain in the title line. Click on it and you can either follow or ignore.
Also: Nope. Not there. No option. If you're going to put a "follow this baseless crap" at the top of this page, "block this baseless crap" needs to be next to it.But, to answer your question about how to block, if you are in your feed you will see the name of the domain in the title line.
No disagreements here. I think the more we can do to help people curate their experience, the better. Where there is a follow, there should also be an ignore. Make sense to me.
I wonder if it might work better to have follow/ignore options for each element as a popup when you click on the element. That might look a little more elegant and allow for more controls. As it is, that top line is already encroaching too far to the left for my taste, but I agree that having both options is better for functionality.
I'm on my phone, at a stoplight but it's there for me. b_b, Can you check and make sure that the ignore is working for domains?
I'm not even a fan of the style of the piece. Frankly, I'm annoyed at you for thinking the quality of the piece rose to the standard of sharing, and equally annoyed that seven people also lacked the intellectual rigor to recognize a baseless polemic when they see it. And I'll bet they did a fair amount of research to support their feelings and if you ask them why they did it, they can tell you. That's the sort of thing that's wholly absent from this screed. It is. It is absolutely that simple. It is positively, demonstrably, 100% that simple. You have fallen victim to fuzzy math. Let's play. Broken down into plain language: "Let's suppose John is selling a pound of tomatoes. He loads his pound of tomatoes into his pickup truck and drives a mile to the farmer's market. Now suppose Sally is also selling tomatoes but Sally loads THREE pounds into her pickup truck! Wowzers! Sally sure is clever - she put more tomatoes in her pickup truck!" The fallacy presented is that agribusiness somehow has "bigger trucks" than local business. It further puts things in false equivalency. The actual argument is: Let's suppose John is selling a truckload of tomatoes. He loads his truck full of tomatoes and drives fifteen miles to his Associated Grocers depot, which adds John's tomatoes to the shipments AG is sending to seven grocery stores within their distribution area. Now lets suppose Sally is selling a truckload of tomatoes. She loads her truck full of tomatoes and drops them off at WalMart's logistics fifteen miles away. AG drives John's tomatoes to grocery stores, where people buy them. Wal Mart, on the other hand, drives Sally's tomatoes 400 miles to the local Consolidation Center, inventories them, packages them and redistributes them to 5 other logistics centers between 500 and 2000 miles away. From the logistics centers, Wal Mart then drives Sally's tomatoes another hundred miles to get them to SuperCenters, which are designed to be no closer than 50 miles apart. Whose tomatoes have more "miles"? I shouldn't have to make these comments. I'm annoyed that I have to sink the time into this crap in order to dismantle an argument that has absolutely no basis in fact, and makes exactly zero attempt to ground its assertions in any sort of evidence. This is like saying "The easter bunny is real" and then acting as if evidence was presented that needs to be refuted.So what you're saying is you weren't a fan of the piece? :)
I posted it because I have a number of friends/family that are REALLY involved in the whole local movement, so much so that one of them quit a high paying marketing gig in Chicago to move to rural Michigan and become a farmer.
As I mentioned below, one of the the things that is most often pointed to as a major benefit from the local movement is that it saves from all the fuel costs of sending a truck from mexico to the midwest so we can all have tomato's year round. I hear this often. But it's not that simple and it shouldn't be painted as such.
For instance, suppose John drives 1 lbs of tomatoes 1 mile to the farmer’s market. Now suppose, Sally drives 3 lbs of tomatoes 2 miles to the farmer’s market. John’s food has fewer food miles, but Sally’s food has less miles per unit of food and, all else equal, less emissions per unit of food.
I think people tend to share as much for the ensuing conversation as they do the piece that inspired it. I've shared posts that you've commented on just because of your comments, without actually having read the piece.
I shared it, because I wanted to see what others thought. I disagree with the article, and wrote as much below, but sometimes I share things I don't agree with to see if I'm missing something. It's not always an endorsement, but rather a way spread a story I think warrants discussion.Srsly? seven fucking shares for this drivel?
First, charging for carbon emissions will solve the problem more comprehensively. Changes in consumer behavior can only go so far. In particular, if the local food movement manages to reduce carbon emissions in food production because it reduces fuel consumption, that will just free up the saved fuel to be used elsewhere. This is a problem that befalls a lot of these consumer-focused approaches to reducing fossil fuel consumption. Reducing demand will, in all likelihood, just cause the price of fossil fuels to fall, which will lead to others buying up and using the fuels for other purposes. So these kinds of micro reductions in carbon emissions do not reduce aggregate emissions; they just move them around.
this is stupid
Justify yourself? If the energy reduction of enough volume, it will lower costs, which will then be pounced upon by everyone else. Plenty of businesses currently invest extra costs to reduce their energy consumption. If gas was cheap, they wouldn't have to do that...this is stupid
It assumes a market principles that have not been proven just hand-waved by neo-classical economics. 1) it assumes that fuel purchase is something that scales with price. ( Oh gas is 10% cheaper I will drive 10% mores).
2) It assumes full knowledge and rational actors. (the twin inanities that prevent economics from being anything but a pseudo-science). a. fuel is what is known as a grudge purchase. if I have 100 miles I need to go I buy 100 miles worth of gasoline to do it. Mostly independently of price and certainly not smoothly graduated.
b. fuel costs (in currency) are fantastically low for shipping a 10% dip in demand would be expressed as not enough to care about.
As to your point 1a, I very much enjoyed the economists reactions to skyrocketing gasoline prices back in 07-08. At that time gas went from something less than $2.70/gal to about $4.15 in the space of one year. Every day on Marketplace some other bonehead would be head scratching and ad hoc-ing about why people weren't driving less. I believe that above $4, there actually began to be modest decrease in driving distance per consumer, but then the economy tanked and gas fell to nothing so we were never able to see really long term data. Whatever the case, there is certainly little or no elasticity in the price of gas.
it is just speculatin' dressed up with math.
I had a working economist tell me that checking for normalcy of distributions was a waste of time because "economic statistics is far more sophisticated then that used by biologists and physicists" he also told me that doing derivatives of discontinuous functions was "normal" and done all the time by "scientists".
Neo-classical economics passes both the Popper and Latakos test of being pseudo-science
it is not falsifiable and does not predict novel truths that turn out to be true. Bah Humbug.
:) Although in the larger economic field there are quite a few very clever folks doing good work.
I think that is the point I made that ended our correspondence. The scary part is that these guys write policy, ruin lives.
Yeah, it didn't make sense to me either. Is the author saying that if you don't use it, someone else will? If so, that is a pretty weak justification for doing anything in life. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the point though. Is that how you understood it?
it is a magic mantra from the charlatans from Chicago. (neo-classical economics unproven but oft repeated)
I agree that many people who brand themselves as "locavores" are people that are driven by pure sentimentality, for a nostalgia for a past that never was, but there are other people that care about what happens to their food in transit and the steps that have been taken to produce food that will survive said transit, whether it be by breeding, processing or whatever else. One of my favorite things about living outside the US is that towns and cities in the places I have lived were engineered for human habitation in the absence of cars. Simply put, most American towns and cities make no sense at all without transportation. Currently I live in New England, which is of course one of the oldest populated areas of the US and even here it's a pain to get out to the store to get groceries or whatever. If you scan the landscape though, it's pretty clear that most of the surrounding area used to be farms and the murals in town show the old wet market as it used to exist. Now, subdivisions bear the names of the family farms that they were built on and the lone market in town survives by catering to college students and the faculty of the university, by way of organic foods and gourmet food products. That's all well and good if you have money, but for people who can't justify the cost of shopping there, the closest market is about 10 miles away in another town. For me, locally sourced food is not at all about the carbon footprint, it's about keeping and creating jobs in areas that historically produced food and most importantly of all to me, freshness and variety. I used to go to the markets in Vietnam as early as I could to get the freshest food possible. This meant that I'd see farmers bringing in vegetables with the dirt still on it and be able to pick the best chickens before they were slaughtered. Hell, I was even able to get a piglet at a market. I didn't eat him though, I'd just always wanted a pig. And the fish. There are few things in life as good as freshly caught fish, and the ability to walk up to the fishermen as they pulled into the harbor with their catch is something I'm not sure I'll have the pleasure to do again. In New England, the catch is all flash frozen on the boat, which does a good job of preserving it, but it's just not the same. People forget that there's people working to produce the food we eat. In a real market, relationships are formed between these people and the consumers. The customers go to the vendors and producers they trust, which in turn creates an obligation for the vendor or producer to take care of the customer in the interest of continuing to do business with them. And who doesn't like to hear that their work has brought a good experience directly from the source? Feedback is a powerful thing on a person-to-person basis, but somehow it loses power when it's filtered through an 800 number to some operator in who-knows-where.
For me, locally sourced food is not at all about the carbon footprint, it's about keeping and creating jobs in areas that historically produced food and most importantly of all to me, freshness and variety.
I would agree with this and thought that reading this post corresponded nicely with reading syncretic's post about the Apples. Also, for me the local food "movement" is as much about being social as it is about food. Going to coops, belonging to CSA's and going to your local farmers market are all really social things. Going to your major grocery chain, isn't. Like you say, "relationships are formed," there is certainly a value in that.