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Eating ethically -- it's complicated
The Wednesday farmers market in Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles features local fruits and vegetables from surrounding areas.
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Tess Vigeland: Buying local is trendy these days. Really trendy. And it's not just hipsters looking to score locally grown lemon oregano. People have all sorts of reasons for spending their food budget close to home Support the local economy. Help out the environment -- fewer miles traveled means less pollution, right? It turns out, like so many things, it's complicated.
From the Marketplace Sustainability desk, Adriene Hill reports.
Adriene Hill: Pity the potato. It's a long haul from the soiled hands of the farm worker to the shiny, misty shelves at the grocery store.
Food, like our potato, travels an average of 1,500 miles before it realizes its life purpose on the end of a fork. That's about the distance from Omaha to Los Angeles. And it's enough of a trek -- involving enough gas and pollution -- to get some people all worked up about "food miles."
Want to reduce that number? Try your local farmer's market.
Farmer shouting
Hill: I wanted to know how far these potatoes have traveled.
Alex Weiser: They have traveled around 110 miles, 115 miles.
Hill: And are they good travelers?
Weiser: Yeah, they travel well.
Apparently, they don't fuss in the back seat. Alex Weiser runs Weiser Family Farms. He's got a table of beautiful heirloom potatoes.
Weiser: I think people want food that is grown locally, and is grown for flavor, and has great nutritional value and is not wasting resources.
Kathleen Merrigan is the U.S. deputy secretary of agriculture. She says there are all sorts of reasons farmers are good neighbors. Local farms help people eat better by making fresh, healthy foods more available. And buying local can help support local economies.
Kathleen Merrigan: All wonderful stuff.
Today, when it's so hard to figure out how to spend our food budget responsibly, and ethically and sustainably, food miles can seem like an easy indicator. But it's not quite that simple.
For one, food miles are not the best way to judge how much pollution food is responsible for.
Merrigan: We know from our studies that the fuel use per unit of product delivered to consumers may be higher or lower.
Transportation only accounts for about 10 percent of the pollution created by the food we eat. And "local" doesn't say anything about how the food was grown; just imagine the energy it takes to grow a tomato in the winter in a heated greenhouse.
Chris Nicholson: If they are trying to minimize energy usage, there have been a number of studies that have shown it's probably better changing your diet than it is to think about buying local.
Chuck Nicholson is a professor at Cornell and Cal Poly.
According to one study, cutting red meat and dairy out of your diet one day a week has the same environmental impact as eating local. Nicholson has studied the impact of reducing food miles in the dairy industry -- research he says that points to a broader issue with the local food movement.
Nicholson: Your local decisions can have effects on people farther away.
If you and I and our neighbors start buying local, whole systems of food production will be affected. Which isn't always a good thing, especially if you're the farmer far away.
Gawain Kripke: There are other issues to be concerned about in the sourcing of our food, including social justice.
Gawain Kripke is policy director at OxFam in Washington, D.C. His colleagues worked on an analysis of the global food market to show how dependant farmers in poorer countries are on the food dollars of developed countries.
One tidbit from the study: UK food-supply chains support one to one and a half million farm workers in sub-Saharan Africa.
Kripke: We don't want to exclude small food producers in poor countries just because they are distant from us, because we're using this distance measure.
The basic idea is that if you buy your broccoli from your local farmer, you're not buying it at the grocery store. Which means that the broccoli farmer in another part of the world that sells to your grocery store, won't have a market for it and won't make a living.
It's a bit of a conundrum. How do you feed yourself and your family in a way that's good for them and everybody else and the planet?
According to the experts, it boils down to something like this: Buy fruits and veggies in season. Look for fair-trade labels on international foods. Buy local, when it makes sense. Waste less. And, eat less meat.
I feel like I always wind up saying that.
I'm Adriene Hill for Marketplace Money.
Thanks for the interesting follow-up. I found the story rather lax and lopsided as well. Perhaps the show could find a "sustainability" commentator each week from some organization like Sierra Club. I would love to see it replace that silly segment every week about what people have in their wallets.
Ooof...really? My bulk purchases of tomatoes and peppers and eggplants from my local farmer's market all summer and fall (to make my own sauce and roasted veggies to freeze for use all winter) is somehow depriving poor farmers elsewhere in the world? Give me a break! I'm still spending money, still consuming--I'm just spending it with my local farmers. I guess I cut out the middle actors--chain stores and large-scale processors--but I don't think I'm leaving families on the edge with my purchasing habits. In fact, I know exactly who receives my money, and they aren't exactly living large off their earnings. This was an incredibly disappointing piece: did Monsanto or ADM underwrite it?
Maybe one of the reasons the story was sloppy is that "sustainable" is not defined. Buying locally is the ultimate in creating a sustainable community because it keeps money circling locally and creates relationships between producer and consumer.
Locally pastured cows and chickens maximize renewable resources with minimal waste. The main inputs are sunshine, grass, and water. The main "output" is recycled to grow more grass. The chickens also provide labor in distributing the manure and improve hygiene by eating the larval pests that grow in the cow flops. Add a bull and a rooster, and you can create materials for next year. Think of the wasteful inputs and outputs that go into canned organic beans shipped. Besides, the price of grass fed beef makes sure you eat it infrequently and savor every bite.
As for sustainable on a worldwide scale, why don't American and European relief organizations purchase food grown in sub-Saharan Africa to feed displaced people in other parts of Africa rather than sending food grown by US farmers to refugee camps? (I know, it's political, not economics.) As for me, since Israeli produce is the only food that I've seen in Philadelphia that was grown anywhere near Africa, I'm not depriving sub-Saharan farmers when I buy produce grown on my food co-op's farm. South American farmers, maybe.
I was with you on a light, interesting, mulling-type article until the "we don't want to exclude small producers in poor countires" defense. What the? That came out of left field. One of the main incentives for going local is, in fact, to support your own community, your own farmer, instead of the one far away. Your own local farmer is most likely also a small producer. And last time I checked, America wasn't "poor" but we certainly have our share of deficiencies to overcome. I know the farmer at my local market isn't driving up in a Porsche or making a Con-Agra executive-level salary... For me it's easy--buy everything I can locally and anything I need/want that isn't available can be filled in with externals.
Agree with other commenters. This story really rung hollow in my ears with its not very thorough reporting.
Talk to Michael Pollen, talk to Alice Waters, talk to Will Allen who is empowering truly local food for poorer inner city residents.
And why can't the farmers in sub-Saharan africa produce food for their OWN local communities? Why can't we cut out red meat one day a week (or more) AND eat locally? It's not an either/or dilemna.
Marketplace, please redo this story with more depth and insight. We listeners expect more depth and nuance from our public radio.
Thank you, Thomas Wallace, for your CRITICALLY RELEVANT, IMPORTANT commentary. I believe Marketplace did enough of a disservice with this story that they should do a follow-up story which includes all of the problems with it that T. Wallace has pointed out.
I'm so cheesed with the sloppy Marketplace Money report about the ethics of local agriculture. If there's more than one variable to consider when discussing a subject, does that mean you headline with "it's complicated"? And, use of words like trendy and hipster are so negative and confining. You might want to consider being more conservative with the use of cheap catch phrases, lousy dialogue, and divisive language, unless of course, you want to turn people off from local agriculture.
This piece didn't help at all to clarify matters for people on the fence about where to spend their food budget. The final message may have been alright, albiet a “complicated†and uninspired local version of Michael Pollan's “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants,†but the path you took to get there was befuddling.
I was somewhat incensed at the commentaries made as to why one should not eat local. The examples given were that the energy used by a locally grown hot house tomato, or that buying local detracts from the lively hood of a farmer in some other country. The hothouse tomato is a really bad example. Most local food is grown seasonally outside. Further more hothouses can be heated with wood waste which is a locally produced carbon neutral fuel unlike jetfuel or diesel. Why should we be so worried about the foreign farmer when we already have shipped off most of our manufacturing jobs which were the backbone of rural economies? Growing local food is about the only thing we can do, and the money spent on it stays in the local economy. And now we shoud feel guilty of growing our own food???
The idea that somehow eating local deprives farmers somewhere in the world of a lively hood is utterly laughable. The global food industry consists of large corporations who receive almost all the benefits of the trade. The people in third world countries who work in these industries cannot afford to buy the very food they help produce. I am reminded of a picture in national geographic where people in Kenya working in the processing plants for Nile Perch could only afford to buy the fish carcasses from the fish they processed.
I have listened to Public Radio for thirty years and can honestly say that I have never heard such nonsensical baseless drivel as I heard on this segment of Marketplace
