So what you're saying is you weren't a fan of the piece? :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is. It is absolutely that simple. It is positively, demonstrably, 100% that simple. You have fallen victim to fuzzy math. Let's play.

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.

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 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 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.