Figuring Food Miles
In the comments thread of another post, Vickie asks:
I have a question for those of you who have already made diet changes to eat locally produced food. I am struggling here. What should a person eat if they live in the north where the growing season is shorter and there is nothing (but meat) produced all winter? Everything seems to be trucked in from somewhere.
That's a great question! Unfortunately, it's also enormously difficult to answer. In fact, a pithy article in Newsweek nicely points up the difficulty of this question -- and of the more general difficulty with relying on individual awareness to achieve good environmental outcomes. Local food turns out to be a great example:
Although lists of "what you can do to save the planet" include eating locally—buying food that is grown nearby—to reduce your carbon footprint, the calculation is more complicated than counting up your food's frequent-flier miles. If the local tomato comes from a greenhouse that gobbled up electricity produced from coal and was trucked in via an 8 miles-per-gallon pickup, and a long-distance one was grown in sunny fields and transported by a 400mpg train, you'll leave a smaller carbon footprint if you opt for the latter.
You can find several more examples like this in a recent New Yorker article.
