Eating Green: Locavore vs. Life Cycle
by Collin Dunn, Corvallis, OR, USA 
on 01.22.08
Yesterday, NPR's Here & Now program hosted author James McWilliams, to talk about "locavores" (it's the 2007 Word of the Year, after all) and some of the ins and outs of food miles vs. life cycle as a way to measure the impact of your eating choices. The gist: sometimes, it takes more energy to grow and harvest local food than it does to grow it far away and have it shipped in, e.g. if you're trying to reduce your carbon footprint, local food isn't always the best choice.
Though this isn't the first time we've discussed this idea, the whole segment is worth a listen. If you're looking for one takeaway, it should probably be this: there is no silver bullet, no one right way to consume food, all the time. Food miles, seasonality and energy inputs (was that chicken raised on grass pasture or fed engineered slop in a cage?) are all important considerations when sourcing your food; eating green is not about putting the blinders on to "eat local" at all costs, or "eat organic," or any other eating buzzword. Eating green is a lifestyle, a mindful way to approach how you fuel yourself without requiring too much fuel from the planet. ::Here & Now
Follow @TreeHugger on Twitter & get our headlines with @TH_rss!
Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- Reduce Your Carbon Footprint by Half in Three Steps
- Eat a Vegetarian Diet, Reduce Your Carbon Footprint by a Ton
- Mister Miyagi's Guide to Going Green: 5 Questions to Always Ask to Think Green and Be Green
- Does Your Car Qualify for the Federal 'Cash for Clunker' Program?
- Does Recycling Really Make a Difference?
- Improve Air Conditioner Efficiency with 9 Cool Tips
Pete's Greens is a VT organic vegetable farm. Pete figured out that the carbon footprint for fresh vegetables in the winter is lower if they are shipped (vie train) from Florida, rather than being grown in his green houses (which must be heated in the depths of winter).
Doesn't eating things from heated green houses defeat the basic principles of eating local. Part of local is seasonal, and a heated greenhouse would point to the fact that the food isn't being grown in the right season!
Has anyone come up with a "green food calculator" that would attempt to balance out all of the factors that go into food production? Carbon consumed in transporting the food, efficiency of production, organic, etc?
My sentiment exactly. Eating local is fantastic, but you have to combine it with eating seasonal or it doesn't make any sense. Most areas have some sort of produce that can grow year-round. Find out what that is and buy it locally. Try to center your meals around those local and seasonal items, and supplement your diet where/if needed with organic produce from another region.
Additionally, a vegetarian or vegan diet can more than make up for it, if you want to indulge in a high-carbon vegetable here and there.
I think we should concentrate on smart solutions instead of saying BAD! BAD! all the time. We start with a good idea - eat local whenever possible. Then others start to say that you're a bad person if you ever eat a banana in North America.
Out of season foods could be OK if they are grown using waste heat from industry. I still see lots of tall stacks putting out steam, let's put those to use warming greenhouses instead. Every industry that dumps heat to the atmosphere could have a rooftop greenhouse, run by themselves or by a specialty company.
Solar thermal or ground-source geothermal could also provide plenty of heat to economically run a properly insulated greenhouse facility. There are plenty of alternative heat sources that do not require carbon emissions.
This just reflects the failure of "consumer choice" as a solution to global problems. There is too much information and too much confusion about what to do. It ends up becoming a mine field, and the average consumer either gives up or makes ineffective choices. Policy makers need to step in at some point and figure out some kind of solution here, even if it just means better labeling.
I just want to clarify that I wasn't passing judgement on heated green houses, I actually give up eating mostly local in the winter now that I'm not living in California. I was just making the point that if someone is going to act on eating local, part of that means eating seasonally. Otherwise it's just eating. And there's nothing wrong with that!
three cheers for buddy.
There is a green way to eat that trumps everything else -- rescuing slightly imperfect food from being thrown away.
No need to worry about local or organic as environmental considerations when you are buying (or finding) fruits and vegetables that are about be thrown away. Just today, I bought 6 red grapefruits for one dollar. Six! A little dry on the outside, but nice and juicy on the inside.
A 2004 study, from the University of Arizona, found that almost half of all food ready for harvest never gets eaten.
One trick is to be creative: bruised apples can be turned into delicious applesauce, and veggies that are past their prime make fine ingredients for a big soup.
You will also save tons of money.
Check out: Minimizing Waste: Eating for the Earth
To those against buying food out of season just because it comes from a heated greenhouse, you have to look at the bigger picture. What is the farm using as a heat source that makes out of season growing possible? There are many ways to heat a greenhouse, some better than others. It would be perfectly acceptable to to me to eat foods grown out of season if the greenhouses are heated with biomass, solar, waste oil, electricity generated by windmills, or other green sources.
We're experimenting with an exclusively locavorian diet in the UK, eating only stuff from 100 miles of where we live. This is useful information.
Joe, an even bigger picture comes from Industrial Ecology: Using waste heat and waste CO2 (because vegetables love that stuff aswell) to power a greenhouse (or aquaculture or whatever you want to do 'out of season')... That makes so much more sens than specifically generating energy for the purpose of growing out of season, even for solar, wind geothermal etc. Reduction ALWAYS comes first.
It's not just energy. The local economy is important too. If your neighbors are poor, they will have to eat cheap imported junk food, put off replacing their jalopy with a clean vehicle, delay those solar panels, etc.
Maybe instead of needing fresh vegitables in the dead of winter, we could do some dehidrating or canning in the summer and fall and have delicious dried and canned fruits and veggies all through the winter without having to heat any greenhouses! (Even though the waste heat idea seems like a decent one). Just preserve your fruits and veggies while they are still in season.
You heated greenhouse people, check out 'bioshelter'. Just google it. Darrel Fry, in western PA-very cold, uses sustainable design, passive solar, thermal mass, and one small wood stove to keep his large bioshelter warm all winter, then he can grow fresh greens, ect. which he delivers to the Pittsburgh scene for a big ticket. He only needs 3 cords of wood per winter to keep in warm.
There are way of doing things beyond one at a time. By intergrating efficient systems to accomplish multiple goals crazy stuff can happen.