Truckonomics : More miles, less environmental impact. Say what?
By Advance Business Capital
The average American meal travels about 1500 miles to get from farm to plate. This is an alarming statistic. The long-distance, large-scale transportation of food consumes large quantities of fossil fuels and generates great amounts of carbon dioxide emissions. That’s why we say, “Local food is miles better!”
Farm to Fork: the “Food Mile” Dilemma
Brochure - San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers Food Market
There’s a weekend produce market in a stadium parking lot about a mile from our house, and most Saturday mornings my wife goes for farm eggs and organic greens and sometimes lamb or even bison. Occasionally I tag along. It’s a wonderfully sensory arena of eaters-and-eaten interaction.
There are about a hundred tented booths: mostly meat, dairy, fruit and vegetables but also hot empanadas, gyros, kebobs and all sorts of tasties from the city’s many ethnic communities. There are even jewelry and scent vendors. The market prohibits resellers, so although goods come from several counties, everything is grown or made within a hundred miles at most.
Locally Produced Produce
There’s also live music, usually provided by mutant descendents of the Grateful Dead from their last tour here a generation ago. Our town has the somewhat dubious renown of being the birthplace of redneck-hippie culture, and the market reflects that both in its vendors and customers, who tend to be either graying boomers like us, or boomers’ children with their own children (often sporting cat whiskers courtesy of the market’s Paint Lady). A lot of the men have ponytails (in the case of the older ones, it’s sometimes their only head hair) and tattoos, many looking like they were done during conditions of compulsory confinement. The women are more varied—women tend not to freeze their looks at the age of peak adolescence—but old or young, the ladies have the brisk air of females in their element, practiced proprietors or canny consumers trading in edibles and edible information.
It’s a mellow circus atmosphere and when the last customer departs and the tents fold up, everyone has the righteous feeling of having bought and sold in wholesome good-for-you, good-for-the-planet organics in defiance of Big Agribusiness and the accompanying dinosaur-sized carbon print of Big Transport.
“Planet Killer” Produce
Across town—in fact all over town—are the crass corporate supermarkets where everyone else does most of their food shopping most of the time (us included). These are either Yuppie Chateaus with wide aisles and tasteful displays or Value Towns with crowed aisles and discount house brands. My practical wife is a Value Towner. I prefer the more elevated class culture of the Chateaus, but either way, we frequent both for whatever produce we don’t get at the farmers market.
Now, we are a very Enlightened City and as you might expect, have a number of righteous organically-oriented supermarkets (including the flagship store of the Wholiest of them all). These markets trumpet their commitment to local produce, but it’s an open secret that local farms can’t supply their enormous needs and that most of their produce—organic or otherwise—is from elsewhere.
Where’s elsewhere? Brother, it’s from everywhere: from below the border, from above the border, from both coasts and from coasts way on the other side of both coasts. It gets here by plane, train and truck. Some of it is organic, a lot isn’t, but regardless, the great bulk of it is Un-local and therefore in the eyes of many environmental advocates, bad for you and Big Blue, our planet.
Are Emissions Evil?
And why is that? Well, there’s an argument to be made that bodywise, local is healthier, but let’s skip that because the main objection is that all this far-off produce comes at the cost of carbon-based fuel that chokes us and warms Big Blue. Just think for a moment of all the fumes from rigs alone, hauling lettuce and lamb chops from hubs and ports thousands of miles away. The term for this is “food miles,” and it’s an accepted measurement of the environmental impact of food distribution.
Now whether we believe that global warming is global-harming or that rigs produce more methane than collective cow flatulence, I doubt anyone wants to take the position of “pollution is good for you.” And, of course, not even the tightest tree hugger believes big cities can get by on acorn mash and hydroponic sprouts.
So it’s a knotty problem. Just how knotty was shown in a recent report by Dr. Jude Capper, assistant professor of dairy science at Washington State University, presented at a conference at Cornell University in October of last year. Capper’s study, which came as no surprise to anyone in the food science field, concluded that in fact it takes fewer resources and less energy to produce and ship food in large quantities for long distances.
The Food Mile Fallacy
Dr. Capper, in an interview with Daniel Bearth of Transport Topics, said, “It seems intuitive that if food travels 30 miles rather than 300 miles, it should have a lower environmental impact… [but] this seldom holds up under scientific examination.” In fact, the reality is so counter-intuitive that it can seem, well, preposterous. For instance, a 2007 article in the New York Times, cited a study proving lamb grown in New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 75% less carbon dioxide than locally grown lamb, in part because poorer British pastures forced farmers to use feed.
The above is an issue of the efficiency of a nutritionally rich pastureland, but the same logic holds for transport. In Capper’s study, a tractor-trailer carrying a load of 23,400 dozen eggs a posited distance of 1,291 miles uses 0.56 liter of fuel per dozen. To compare, this is a figure that a vendor’s van traveling a posited distance of 138 miles from farm to market can’t remotely approach, even if the entire van is stacked floor to ceiling with egg cartons and hauling a rental trailer of same.
The Cargo Conundrum
So does this mean my wife and I should boycott our local farmers market and shop exclusively at Sam’s Club, where food miles are probably the least costly on the planet? Of course not. The bison rancher that sells his super-lean cuts has to make a living too, and I’m grateful he’s chosen this way to do it. (A couple of beers and the aroma of grilled buffalo always makes me want to do a war dance.)
What it does mean is that there’s no simple way to judge environmental impact, whether in produce or anything else. We all want to save Big Blue, but we all also want to keep eating. Highway fumes are noxious for people and the planet, no argument, but the past several years have seen advances in producing less of them, and coming years should see new and better and unexpectedly greener ways to transport green stuff from farm to fork.
This story was drawn from “Hauling Food Long Distances More Efficient Than Buying Locally, Claims New Study” in the November 23, 2009 issue of Transport Topics and “Food that Travels Well” from The New York Times and “Is Local Food Really Miles Better?” in Salon.
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