Practical environmentalism -- doing the math on the costs of food production

[mattbell]

Lots of people are enamored with the idea of eating locally produced food as a way of saving energy.  It turns out that it often isn't true.   

Locally produced food can end up tasting better, especially if you buy it freshly picked from a farmer's market and happen to live somewhere awesome like Califormia where crops can grow easily.  However, it's a mistake to assume that the energy costs are substantially lower, or that what works in San Francisco would work in New York. 

This op-ed piece breaks down the energy costs involved in food production.  It turns out the vast majority of cost is incurred in preparation... your grocery runs and the fuel required to cook the food.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/opinion/20budiansky.html

I really wish environmentalists analyzed things like this more often. 

Comments

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

This is far from the first time I've seen this argument, so I'm not sure how much often you're wishing for. And it's the reason I try to as often as I can BIKE to the farmers market instead of driving :) I should also batch-cook more often. I know that's way more efficient.

The true locavore answer to whether it's more "virtuous" to eat the tomato trucked in from CA or the NY tomato grown in a greenhouse is that tomatoes are out of season and don't bloody eat them right now. It's a strawman.

He's also ignoring the other reasons local and organic food are better: food security, increased biodiversity, increased soil quality. Reducing the food question to one of calories only is also sortof a strawman. If he's accusing locavores of simplifying too much he's suffering from the same problem himself!

In other news, I ate Cheetos this afternoon. I don't feel guilty - I just wanted some damned Cheetos :)

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Don't you know that Cheetos are endangered, and have to be flown in from Kenya packed in dry ice? :-)

Regarding other reasons for locavorism:
- What's food security? Do you mean not relying on foreign sources? I imagine that America could fairly easily reconfigure to feed itself just by altering our plant/animal balance in favor of less energy-intensive plants and giving some livestock feed to people for a while until the land used for growing feed and industrial corn are repurposed.

- Why can't we have high biodiversity and high soil quality with food shipped across the country vs local food? (maybe here you're referring to things that differ on organic vs non-organic)

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

By food security I mean both having food nearby in case of disruption of transportation but also in terms of developing multiple sources of the same thing - when, for example, 80% of your shrimp comes from the gulf coast it sucks when there's, say, an oil spill that disrupts shrimp production. Ok, so that's not an agricultural example but I think the idea is similar.

To go with a more agriculture based example - when e coli infected spinach and millions of pounds of spinach were recalled I didn't have to stop eating spinach - I had 100% certainty as to where my farm-share spinach came from and knew it wasn't connected to the contaminated source. Traceability is a lot easier with local food and that's a type of food security. That's not to say my farm share food could never be contaminated - but if it was there are a minimal number of people affected and the farm can contact us all directly and quickly.

Biodiversity is partly an organic food solution but it's more of a local food solution. The economizes of scale that make cross-country and international shipping of food possible pretty much rely on monoculture. Soil quality is more of an organic food thing but of it's also tied into biodiversity.

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

I see how there is some positive value in "food security", but it seems awfully close to zero. Who cares if, once in a century, we have to remove one tiny element of our diet like shrimp or spinach?

The economizes of scale that make cross-country and international shipping of food possible pretty much rely on monoculture.

I don't see how economies of scale in producing food via monoculture have anything to do with transportation. Economies of scale in production lead to less food variety, but that is unrelated to international shipping. International shipping of food is possible because container shipping by water is insanely cheap, hence transportation costs are very low. With those low transportation costs, if we had lots of food variety, we'd still be shipping it all over the world.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

Who cares if, once in a century, we have to remove one tiny element of our diet like shrimp or spinach?

a) I can recall at least a half dozen food recalls in the past decade. I don't know where you're getting "once a century" from.
b) I think the people who died from e. coli poisoning care. To be fair I'm not saying local food eliminates food contamination - I'm just saying it's easier to track when it happens so it's easier to fix before a lot of people are affected.
c) We threw away an awful lot of perfectly good food because some small percentage of it was contaminated but we didn't know which ones so we had to toss it all. Shorter supply chain, less food potentially affected, only have to toss the stuff that's actually bad.

I don't see how economies of scale in producing food via monoculture have anything to do with transportation.

Because it's more efficient for me as a shipper to go one farm and pick up one shipment of bananas than it is to go to 50 different small farms and pick up 50 small batches of bananas. It's not the journey across the ocean in a container ship that's at issue - it's the journey getting to the container ship. Also, if you're a mass producer of bananas you're simply not going to be able to find enough of a market locally so you will HAVE to ship them out to make a profit.

This all seems really really obvious to me so the fact that you're saying you don't see a connections tells me you must be thinking about this from a whole different angle, one I'm not seeing.

With those low transportation costs, if we had lots of food variety, we'd still be shipping it all over the world.

I think you're misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying international shipping is bad. I'm saying monoculture farms are bad. Eating locally supports small farms that grow a variety of different things all in one place. If I could sign up for a "farm share" of tropical fruits from a farm in south America somewhere that would box it all up together and sent it to me every couple of weeks I might do that to, but I don't see anyone working on that angle. So in the meantime that farm is going to go on growing nothing but acres of bananas and shipping boxes of nothing but bananas.

[sarcazm.livejournal.com]

locally produced food usually costs a LOT more too. unless, of course, you're the one doing the producing, i can only assume, in quantities large enough to earn a profit (or at least break even) while also sustaining yourself. and even though it tastes worse, in my opinion, and you lose nutritional value when you buy mass-produced frozen or canned produce, for example, it takes a whole lot longer to go bad. meanwhile, even non-organic non-locally grown produce often ends up in the trash before you get to use it, and those without those added pesticides, treatments, waxes, coatings, and whatever else they put on them, have a tendency, in my experience, to spoil far more quickly.

and then, of course, it's another trip for more groceries to replace the ones that just molded. or the milk, i won't even think about it, whether or not it's pasteurized, considering my lactose intolerance. and while i may not be a fan in any way of super-bacteria due to all the antibiotics they inject in cattle and whatnot in attempts to protect the herds, which in turn messes with us in the long-term, the alternatives aren't so hot either, considering our consumption levels.

personally, after my last bought dealing with organic soil nearly killing my own mini-crop of 63 thai chili pepper plants (we did lose many, but those are the ones that survived the spider mites that arrived in the soil, at least i caught the fungus gnat eggs before they had a chance to hatch), and losing all my basil, i'm an even bigger proponent of pesticides.

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

Great article.

I will have to forward this to our social mailing list at work. Recently, there was a discussion on it about whether it would be good for Trader Joes to open up a branch in our town.

Me and several others were arguing it would be good, while a couple people were emphatically against it due to Trader Joes supposedly being an evil corporation owned by the same German company that owns Aldo's.

Actually, they didn't quite use the word "evil" but basically they were arguing that it was better just to buy local food rather than having a corporation come in and ship it all from far away.

Someone linked to a blog post discussing the issue and the blogger was recommending people oppose Trader Joes opening a branch here... even though the blogger in question had never even been to a Trader Joes. Instead, they had a friend go to one in Chicago, and bring back some "samples" of what they sold. The blogger then went around to locally owned specialty stores and found very similar items, usually for cheaper... and argued that there was no point in having it come here and displace the local shops.

I pointed out that all that driving around from store to store trying to get what you want, rather than having it all in one place.. was bad for the environment. Then people started saying "well, really you should just buy food from the farmer's market that's grown locally".

Anyway, this article will be a nice followup.

[happyinmotion.livejournal.com]

This argument's been pretty well popularised in NZ, in part because we're the research to back it up, and in part because we export our food pretty long distances. We have no subsidies to distort how farmers behave, a pretty innovative farming community, and lots of low-input agriculture with cows actually in fields eating grass, not in feedlots. For many foods, we can produce in NZ, ship and deliver to a supermarket in Europe or Americans with lower carbon emissions than the Europeans or Americans.

However, I don't know how well popularised this is overseas, especially in the countries we export to. Let's face it, if you're a local producer, you're hardly going to be publicising research that points out how inefficient and wasteful your farm is.

Still, from a consumer's point of view, it's very hard to find out what the environmental impact of any food is. All you know is that some has been shipped a long distance and thus has a black mark against it, some hasn't. It's a case of bounded rationality, where incomplete information leads to the wrong decision.

I think the solution (until we have a universal carbon price for all) is going to be for large retailers to demand more information from producers about their environmental impact. And not just carbon emissions, but water use and other ecological impacts. This way the farmers have to front up and the planet-friendly one's get rewarded for getting off their arses and sorting it out. The retailers know that they'll have their arses covered in case a pressure group decides to get up in arms about the issue of the week. The consumers (you and me) have a chance to buy food which has been assured to environmental standards. This is the kind of thinking behind actions like Marks & Spencer's "Plan A".

(Yeah, I work in this area. Can you tell?)

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

I really wish environmentalists analyzed things like this more often.

Then I might respect them instead of viewing them as taking out their neo-Ludditism on my lifestyle :). (And if libertarians analyzed things more often, people might respect them instead of viewing them as taking out their anti-authoritarianism on, err, their somethings). Really, we just need more rational analysis - which is the goal of economics, so I guess we need more economists.