Eating local hurts the planet

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 19:00:00 +0000

The locavores’ only original addition to the rhetoric of past generations of food and environmental activists is the concept of “food miles” — the distance food items travel from farms to consumers — which they use as a proxy for greenhouse gas emissions. In short, the more distance traveled, the more greenhouse gases emitted and the more overall environmental damage. Despite its popularity, the concept and its underlying rationale have been convincingly debunked in numerous Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies, a methodology that examines the environmental impact associated with all the stages of a product’s life cycle, from raw material extraction to disposal of the finished product. Not surprisingly, it turns out that food miles can only be taken at face value in the case of identical items produced simultaneously in the exact same physical conditions but in different locations — in other words, if everything else is equal, which is obviously never the case in the real world.

Production vs. Transportation

Salon.com > Pierre Desrochers

Eating local hurts the planet