The Local Food Movement Benefits Farms, Food Production, Environment
The Local Food Movement, 2010 Pallavi Gogoi is a writer for BusinessWeek Online. She frequently writes on retailing. Just as small family-run, sustainable farms were losing their ability to compete in the food marketplace, the local food movement stepped in with a growing consumer demand for locally grown, organic, fresh produce. In addition to supermarket giants following the trend toward locally grown food and devoting shelf space to such items, local foods are also finding their way into schools, office cafeterias, and even prisons. Although the trend toward organic foods has not waned, consumers are increasingly aware of the environmental impact caused when organic foods must travel to find their way to the local grocery store shelf. For this and other reasons, consumers are opting instead for locally grown counterparts, choosing to eat what is available in each season in their areas rather than purchasing food that must be shipped from other regions. Drive through the rolling foothills of the Appalachian range in southwestern Virginia and you'll come across Abingdon, one of the oldest towns west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. If it happens to be a Saturday morning, you might think there's a party going on—every week between 7 a.m. and noon, more than 1,000 people gather in the parking lot on Main Street, next to the police station. This is Abingdon's farmers' market. "For folks here, this is part of the Saturday morning ritual," says Anthony Flaccavento, a farmer who is also executive director of Appalachian Sustainable Development, a nonprofit organization working in the Appalachian region of Virginia and Tennessee. It's a relatively recent ritual. Five years ago, the farmers' market wasn't as vibrant and it attracted just nine local farmers who sold a few different kinds of veggies. Today, there's a fourfold jump, with 36 farmers who regularly show up with a dizzying array of eggplants, blueberries, pecans, home-churned butter, and meat from animals raised on the farms encircling the town. It's a sign of the times: Hundreds of farmers' markets are springing up all around the country. The U.S. Agriculture Department says the number of such markets reached 4,692 in 2006, its most recent year of data, up 50% from five years earlier. Sales from those markets reached $1 billion.

New Niches
The rise of farmers' markets—in city centers, college towns, and rural squares—is testament to a dramatic shift in American tastes. Consumers increasingly are seeking out the flavors of fresh, vine-ripened foods grown on local farms rather than those trucked to supermarkets from faraway lands. "This is not a fringe foodie culture," says Flaccavento. "These are ordinary, middleincome folks who have become really engaged in food and really care about where their food comes from." It's a movement that is gradually reshaping the business of growing and supplying food to Americans. The local food movement has already accomplished something that almost no one would have thought possible a few years back: a revival of small farms. After declining for more

than a century, the number of small farms has increased 20% in the past six years, to 1.2 million, according to the Agriculture Department. Some are thriving. Michael Paine, 34, who started farming in 2005 on just one acre in Yamhill, Ore., today has six acres of land and 110 families who buy his lettuce, cabbage, peppers, and eggplants. "I like to surprise my families with odd varieties of tomato or an odd eggplant variety, and they love it," says Paine. The local food movement has already accomplished something that almost no one would have thought possible a few years back: a revival of small farms. Patrick Robinette saw a growing interest among Americans in specialty beef, and in 2001 started raising ten cows at Harris Acres farm in Pinetops, N.C. Soon his grass-fed beef was in high demand. He now raises 600 head of cattle and delivers beef to the North Carolina governor's mansion. He has standing orders from 37 restaurants, three specialty stores, and six cafeterias.

Large Retailers Act
The impact of "locavores" [as local-food proponents are known] even shows up in that Washington salute every five years to factory farming, the farm bill. The latest version passed both houses in Congress in early May and was sent on May 20 to President George W. Bush's desk for signing. Bush has threatened to veto the bill, but it passed with enough votes to sustain an override. Predictably, the overwhelming bulk of its $290 billion would still go to powerful agribusiness interests in the form of subsidies for growing corn, soybeans, and cotton. But $2.3 billion was set aside this year for specialty crops, such as the eggplants, strawberries, or salad greens that are grown by exactly these small, mostly organic farmers. That's a big bump-up from the $100 million that was earmarked for such things in the previous legislation. Small farmers will be able to get up to 75% of their organic certification costs reimbursed, and some of them can obtain crop insurance. There's money for research into organic foods, and to promote farmers' markets. Senator Tom Harkin [D-Iowa] said the bill "invests in the health and nutrition of American children by expanding their access to farmers' markets and organic produce." $2.3 billion was set aside this year for specialty crops, such as the eggplants, strawberries, or salad greens that are grown by exactly these small, mostly organic farmers. The local food movement has not been lost on the giants of food retailing. Large supermarket chains like Wal-Mart (WMT), Kroger (KR), and even Whole Foods (WFMI) depend on their scale to compete. Their systems of buying, delivering, and stocking are not easily adapted to the challenges of providing local food, which by its nature involves many diverse groups of farmers. People have gotten used to eating tomatoes and strawberries at all times of the year, and many parts of the country are too cold to produce them in the winter. Thus, even Whole Foods, which bills itself as the world's leading retailer of natural and organic foods, has committed to buying from barely four local farmers at each of its stores.

Wal-Mart, which in the last couple of years ran a "Salute to America's Farmers" program, says that buying from local farmers not only satisfies customers' desires, but also fits the company's commitment to sustainability and cutting down on food transportation. However, the company admits that local farms can never take over the produce aisle completely. "It gets complicated since not every state grows apples and lettuce, and even when they do, it doesn't grow at all times of the year," said Bruce Peterson, formerly Wal-Mart's senior vice president of perishables, in an interview 17 months ago. He has since left the company.

Broad Agenda
Nonetheless, all the giants are devoting a small but growing share of shelf space to locally bought produce. Some are even inviting the farmers into the store to promote their goods. "Obviously supermarkets don't want to lose that business," says Michael Pollan, author of the best seller The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Neither Wal-Mart nor Whole Foods will quantify how much business they get from locally grown food. Many consumers believe that organic foods, though seemingly healthy, may still damage the environment. The very definition of "local" food presents a ceiling of sorts for successful small farmers. If they start shipping more than 250 miles or so, they cease to be local and their appeal vanishes. The optimal solution is to locate near densely populated areas, but that's where acreage is scarce. "Land prices are very expensive around metro and urban areas, which is a barrier to entry," says Pollan. He thinks the solution will be for farmers to look for ways to farm more varieties of food. The local food movement has many of the same hallmarks of the organic foods movement, which sprang up in the 1970s to place a premium on foods grown without pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. Indeed, almost all of today's small farmers use organic techniques. But many consumers believe that organic foods, though seemingly healthy, may still damage the environment. For instance, organic fruits that are grown in Chile and Argentina and then shipped halfway around the world require fossil fuels and carbon emissions to power tankers and trucks thousands of miles. Instead of just focusing on pesticides and chemicals, consumers who have been educated by movies like An Inconvenient Truth now pore over "food miles" and "carbon footprints." The message seems to be: If you buy organic, you care about your own body; if you buy local, you care about your body and the environment. As more and more consumers take those values to the store with them, the impact is being felt far from the predictable centers of "green" consciousness. In Bloomington, Ind., supermarket chains such as Kroger still dominate, but an upstart called Bloomingfoods Market that specializes in local fare lately has been stealing market share. Today the cooperative has 7,000 shopping members, up from 2,000 five years ago. It works with 180 farmers to offer everything from strawberries and persimmons to squash and shiitake mushrooms. "We're seeing a real renaissance," says Ellen Michel, marketing manager for Bloomingfoods. As the local food movement grows more mainstream, it's showing up in unexpected places. Corporations such as Best Buy (BBY) in Minneapolis, DreamWorks (DWA) in Los Angeles, and Nordstrom (JWN) in Seattle are providing local options in their cafeterias. "We try to

purchase as much as we can from farmers in a 150-mile radius," says Fedele Bauccio, CEO of Bon Appétit Management, which runs more than 400 cafeterias for companies like Oracle (ORCL) and Target (TGT).

Blossoming Interest
As many as 1,200 school districts around the country, from Alabama to Iowa, have linked up with local farms to serve fresh vegetables and fruit to children. Colleges such as Brown, Cornell, the University of Montana, and the University of California, Berkeley are buying from their state's own producers. Last year, Iowa's Woodbury County mandated that its food service supplier buy from local farmers for places where it serves food, such as its prison and detention center. As many as 1,200 school districts around the country, from Alabama to Iowa, have linked up with local farms to serve fresh vegetables and fruit to children. And in hundreds of towns, people are signing up for CSAs, or community supported agriculture organizations, where they pay a local farmer for a weekly supply of produce during the harvest season. In 2000, there were around 400 farms that had CSA programs; today there are more than 1,800 nationwide. Families typically pay a farm $150 to $650 each year in return for a weekly basket of vegetables, fruits, eggs, meat, or baked goods. In New York City, where 11,000 residents participate with 50 farms, the demand is so high that there's a wait list. And in some inner cities, like the Bronx, a borough of New York City, organizations are training community gardeners to grow vegetables like collard greens, herbs, and beets for their community, changing food habits in the process. "We are even teaching people how to prepare seasonal produce," says Jacquie Berger, executive director of Just Food, a nonprofit that helps fresh food growers sell to residents in the Bronx. That may be less of an issue in more pastoral settings such as Abingdon. But residents of the Virginia town look forward to Saturday at the farmers' market, mingling, passing out petitions, and letting the kids snack on berries while their parents shop for the week's groceries in a fresh setting. "There's a groundswell of interest not just for vegetables and fruits, but also eggs, poultry, and meat—people want it close to home, as fresh as possible, and produced sustainably," says farmer Flaccavento.

Further Readings
Books
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Geoff AndrewsThe Slow Food Story: Politics and Pleasure. Montreal, Quebec: McGillQueen's University Press, 2008. Lou BendrickEat Where You Live: How to Find and Enjoy Fantastic Local and Sustainable Food No Matter Where You Live. Seattle, WA: Skipstone, 2008. Samuel FromartzOrganic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books, 2006.

           

Brian HalweilEat Here: Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. Daniel ImhoffFood Fight: The Citizen's Guide to a Food and Farm Bill. Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2007. Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp, and Camille KingsolverAnimal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Gaston T. LaBue, ed.Hunger in America: Issues and Assistance. New York: Nova Science Publishing, Inc., 2009. James E. McWilliamsJust Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2009. Gary Paul NabhanComing Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Michael PollanIn Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008. Michael PollanThe Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006. Jill RichardsonRecipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. Brooklyn, NY: Ig Publishing, 2009. Joel SalatinEverything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front. Swoope, VA: Polyface, 2007. Peter Singer and Jim MasonThe Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. New York: Rodale, 2006. Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnonPlenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.

Periodicals
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Brita Belli "Local Is the New Organic," E: The Environmental Magazine, March 2007. Javier Blas and Jenny Wiggins "Food Companies Put Sustainability on the Menu," Financial Times, November 12, 2009. Grace Lee Boggs "Food for All: How to Grow Democracy: Detroit's 'Quiet Revolution,'" Nation, September 21, 2009. Marian Burros "How to Eat (and Read) Close to Home," New York Times, August 29, 2007. John Cloud "Eating Better Than Organic," Time, March 2, 2007. Gilbert M. Gaul and Dan Morgan "A Slow Demise in the Delta: U.S. Farm Subsidies Favor Big over Small, White over Black," Washington Post, June 20, 2007. Pallavi Gogoi "Innovation on the Farm," BusinessWeek, May 21, 2008. www.buinessweek.com. Jerry Hagstrom "Farm Bill Provided Roots for Local Food Promotion Effort," Congress Daily AM, October 20, 2009. Rich Heffern "Healthy Eating vs. Feeding the World: Our Food System Figures into Health Care Reform Debate," National Catholic Reporter, October 30, 2009. Michael Hill "As Local Food Gains, Local Planners Face Decisions," Associated Press, November 4, 2009. Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry "A 50-Year Farm Bill," New York Times, January 4, 2009.

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Paul D. Johnson "Voting with Your Fork: There Are Good Reasons for Buying Organic and Local," National Catholic Reporter, August 21, 2009. Renée Johnson "What Is the Farm Bill?" CRS Report for Congress, September 23, 2008. Hugh Joseph "A Pro-Food Farm Bill," Boston Globe, July 9, 2007. Corby Kummer "Graze Locally: Shoppers Are Finding More Ways to Buy Humanely Raised Meat from Close-to-Home Farms," Atlantic, May 1, 2009. Terra Lawson-Remer "The U.S. Farm Bill and the Global Food Crisis," Huffington Post, May 29, 2008. James E. McWilliams "The Locavore Myth: Why Buying from Nearby Farmers Won't Save the Planet," Forbes, August 3, 2009. Ann Monroe "The Cost of Eating Green," MSN Money, December 17, 2007. Lindsey Nair "Local Food Movement Still Gaining Momentum," Roanoke Times (Roanoke, VA), September 13, 2009. Plenty "Some Interesting Locavore Statistics," March 24, 2009. www.plentymag.com. Michael Pollan "You Are What You Grow," New York Times Magazine, April 22, 2007. Terry Pristin "With a Little Help, Greens Come to Low-Income Neighborhoods," New York Times, June 16, 2009. Paul Roberts "Farming for Real," Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2009. Margot Roosevelt "Local-Food Movement: The Lure of the 100-Mile Diet," Time, June 12, 2006. Elizabeth Royte "And on Your Left, a Grass-Fed Cow," OnEarth, Fall 2007. Sally Schuff "USDA Lists Farm Bill Priorities," Feedstuffs, April 20, 2009. Kim Severson "When 'Local' Makes It Big," New York Times, May 12, 2009. Joseph B. Treaster "United Nations Food Leader on Defeating Hunger," Huffington Post, November 28, 2009. Bryan Walsh "Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food," Time, August 21, 2009. Yvonne Zipp "The School Lunchroom Grows Green," Christian Science Monitor, May 29, 2009.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2010 Greenhaven Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning.

Source Citation
Gogoi, Pallavi. "The Local Food Movement Benefits Farms, Food Production, Environment." The Local Food Movement. Amy Francis. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2010. At Issue. Rpt. from "The Rise of the 'Locavore': How the Strengthening Local Food Movement in Towns Across the U.S. Is Reshaping Farms and Food Retailing." Business Week Online. 2008. Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Web. 23 Feb. 2013. Document URL http://ic.galegroup.com.ezproxy.apollolibrary.com/ic/ovic/ViewpointsDetailsPage/ViewpointsDe tailsWindow?failOverType=&query=&prodId=OVIC&windowstate=normal&contentModules= &mode=view&displayGroupName=Viewpoints&limiter=&currPage=&disableHighlighting=tru e&displayGroups=&sortBy=&source=&search_within_results=&zid=&action=e&catId=&activi

tyType=&scanId=&documentId=GALE%7CEJ3010722203&userGroupName=uphoenix&jsid= e3923d0c446785d4c0059aefb8f97e65 Gale Document Number: GALE|EJ3010722203

Local Food Is Not Necessarily Better for the Environment
The Local Food Movement, 2010 Sarah DeWeerdt is a writer based in Seattle, Washington. She specializes in biology and environmental topics. Many consumers are opting to buy local food to reduce environmental damage caused by food miles—the distance food travels from farm to consumer. However, food miles make up only a small percentage of the total greenhouse gas emissions created by farming. Farming practices, such as pesticide use and the type of food produced, have a greater impact on the environment than food miles alone. For example, animals naturally produce large amounts of methane, contributing more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than transportation creates; therefore, consuming fewer animal products can have a larger positive impact on the environment than buying local. Food miles are just one of many factors consumers should consider when trying to make ethical food purchases. In 1993, a Swedish researcher calculated that the ingredients of a typical Swedish breakfast— apple, bread, butter, cheese, coffee, cream, orange juice, sugar—traveled a distance equal to the circumference of the earth before reaching the Scandinavian table. In 2005, a researcher in Iowa found that the milk, sugar, and strawberries that go into a carton of strawberry yogurt collectively journeyed 2,211 miles (3,558 kilometers) just to get to the processing plant. As the local food movement has come of age, this concept of "food miles" (or "kilometers")—roughly, the distance food travels from farm to plate—has come to dominate the discussion, particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, and parts of Western Europe. The concept offers a kind of convenient shorthand for describing a food system that's centralized, industrialized, and complex almost to the point of absurdity. And, since our food is transported all those miles in ships, trains, trucks, and planes, attention to food miles also links up with broader concerns about the emissions of carbon dioxide [CO2] and other greenhouse gases from fossil fuel-based transport.

Transporting Our Food
In the United States, the most frequently cited statistic is that food travels 1,500 miles on average from farm to consumer. That figure comes from work led by Rich Pirog, the associate director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. (He is also behind the strawberry yogurt calculations referenced above). In 2001, in some of the country's first food miles research, Pirog and a group of researchers analyzed the transport of 28 fruits and vegetables to Iowa markets via local, regional, and conventional food distribution systems. The team calculated that produce in the conventional system—a national network using semitrailer trucks to haul food to large grocery stores—traveled an average of 1,518 miles (about 2,400 kilometers). By contrast, locally sourced food traveled an average of just 44.6 miles (72 kilometers) to Iowa markets. In light of such contrasts, the admonition to "eat local" just seems like common sense. And indeed, at the most basic level, fewer transport miles do mean fewer emissions. Pirog's team

found that the conventional food distribution system used four to 17 times more fuel and emitted five to 17 times more CO2 than the local and regional (the latter of which roughly meant Iowawide) systems. Similarly, a Canadian study estimated that replacing imported food with equivalent items locally grown in the Waterloo, Ontario, region would save transport-related emissions equivalent to nearly 50,000 metric tons of [CO2] or the equivalent of taking 16,191 cars off the road. One problem with trying to determine whether local food is greener is that there's no universally accepted definition of local food.

Defining Local
But what exactly is "local food" in the first place? How local is local? One problem with trying to determine whether local food is greener is that there's no universally accepted definition of local food. Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, authors of The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating, write that they chose this boundary for their experiment in eating locally because "a 100-mile radius is large enough to reach beyond a big city and small enough to feel truly local. And it rolls off the tongue more easily than the '160-kilometer diet.'" Sage Van Wing, who coined the term "locavore" with a friend when she was living in Marin County, California, was inspired to eat local after reading Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, a chronicle of author Gary Paul Nabhan's own year-long effort to eat only foods grown within 250 miles of his northern Arizona home. She figured that if Nabhan could accomplish that in the desert, she could do even better in the year-round agricultural cornucopia that is northern California, so she decided to limit herself to food from within 100 miles. There's some evidence that a popular understanding of local food is, at least in some places, coalescing around this 100-mile limit. A 2008 Leopold ... [Center for Sustainable Agriculture] survey of consumers throughout the United States found that two-thirds considered local food to mean food grown within 100 miles. Still, a variety of other definitions also persist. Sometimes local means food grown within a county, within a state or province, or even, in the case of some small European nations, within the country. In the United Kingdom, reports Tara Garnett of the Food Climate Research Network, "on the whole, organizations supporting local are now less likely to put numbers on things." Meanwhile, rural sociologist Clare Hinrichs, of Pennsylvania State University, has found that in Iowa local has shifted from signifying food grown within a county or a neighboring one to food grown anywhere in the state. For some in the agricultural community, promoting and eating "local Iowa food" is almost a kind of food patriotism, aimed at counteracting the forces of globalization that have put the state's family farmers at risk. All of those are perfectly valid ways of thinking about local. But they don't have all that much to do with environmental costs and benefits.

Local Isn't Always Better

In any case, warns Pirog, food miles/kilometers don't tell the whole story. "Food miles are a good measure of how far food has traveled. But they're not a very good measure of the food's environmental impact." That impact depends on how the food was transported, not just how far. For example, trains are ten times more efficient at moving freight, ton for ton, than trucks are. So you could eat potatoes trucked in from 100 miles away, or potatoes shipped by rail from 100 miles away, or potatoes shipped by rail from 1,000 miles, and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with their transport from farm to table would be roughly the same. The environmental impact of food also depends on how it is grown. Swedish researcher Annika Carlsson-Kanyama led a study that found it was better, from a greenhouse gas perspective, for Swedes to buy Spanish tomatoes than Swedish tomatoes, because the Spanish tomatoes were grown in open fields while the local ones were grown in fossil fuel-heated greenhouses. That seems obvious, but there are subtler issues at play as well. For example, Spain has plenty of the warmth and sunshine that tomatoes crave, but its main horticultural region is relatively arid and is likely to become more drought-prone in the future as a result of global climate change. What if water shortages require Spanish growers to install energy-intensive irrigation systems? And what if greenhouses in northern Europe were heated with renewable energy? A broader, more comprehensive picture of all the trade-offs in the food system requires tracking greenhouse gas emissions through all phases of a food's production, transport, and consumption.

Why Consumers Focus on Food Miles
Perhaps it's inevitable that we consumers gravitate to a focus on food miles—the concept represents the last step before food arrives on our tables, the part of the agricultural supply chain that's most visible to us. And indeed, all other things being equal, it's better to purchase something grown locally than the same thing grown far away. "It is true that if you're comparing exact systems, the same food grown in the same way, then obviously, yes, the food transported less will have a smaller carbon footprint," Pirog says. But a broader, more comprehensive picture of all the trade-offs in the food system requires tracking greenhouse gas emissions through all phases of a food's production, transport, and consumption. And life cycle analysis (LCA), a research method that provides precisely this "cradle-to-grave" perspective, reveals that food miles represent a relatively small slice of the greenhouse gas pie. In a paper published last year, Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews, of Carnegie Mellon University, wove together data from a variety of U.S. government sources into a comprehensive life cycle analysis of the average American diet. According to their calculations, final delivery from producer or processor to the point of retail sale accounts for only 4 percent of the U.S. food system's greenhouse gas emissions. Final delivery accounts for only about a quarter of the total miles, and 40 percent of the transport-related emissions, in the food supply chain as a whole. That's because there are also "upstream" miles and emissions associated with things like

transport of fertilizer, pesticides, and animal feed. Overall, transport accounts for about 11 percent of the food system's emissions. By contrast, Weber and Matthews found agricultural production accounts for the bulk of the food system's greenhouse gas emissions: 83 percent of emissions occur before food even leaves the farm gate. A recent life cycle analysis of the UK [United Kingdom] food system, by Tara Garnett, yielded similar results. In her study, transport accounted for about a tenth of the food system's greenhouse gas emissions, and agricultural production accounted for half. Garnett says the same general patterns likely also hold for Europe as a whole.

The Environmental Cost of What We Eat
The other clear result that emerges from these analyses is that what you eat matters at least as much as how far it travels, and agriculture's overwhelming "hot spots" are red meat and dairy production. In part that's due to the inefficiency of eating higher up on the food chain—it takes more energy, and generates more emissions, to grow grain, feed it to cows, and produce meat or dairy products for human consumption, than to feed grain to humans directly. But a large portion of emissions associated with meat and dairy production take the form of methane and nitrous oxide, greenhouse gases that are respectively 23 and 296 times as potent as carbon dioxide. Methane is produced by ruminant animals (cows, goats, sheep, and the like) as a by-product of digestion and is also released by the breakdown of all types of animal manure. Nitrous oxide also comes from the breakdown of manure (as well as the production and breakdown of fertilizers). In Garnett's study, meat and dairy accounted for half of the UK food system's greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, she writes, "the major contribution made by agriculture itself reflects the GHG [greenhouse gas] intensity of livestock rearing." Weber and Matthews came to a similar conclusion: "No matter how it is measured, on average red meat is more GHG-intensive than all other forms of food," responsible for about 150 percent more emissions than chicken or fish. In their study the second-largest contributor to emissions was the dairy industry. Nor are these two studies unique in their findings. A group of Swedish researchers has calculated that meat and dairy contribute 58 percent of the total food emissions from a typical Swedish diet. At a global level, the UN [United Nations] Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that livestock account for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions—more even than all forms of fossil fuel-based transport combined. Replacing red meat and dairy with vegetables one day a week would be like driving 1,160 miles less.

Dietary Changes Are More Important Than Local Eating
"Broadly speaking, eating fewer meat and dairy products and consuming more plant foods in their place is probably the single most helpful behavioral shift one can make" to reduce foodrelated greenhouse gas emissions, Garnett argues.

Weber and Matthews calculated that reducing food miles to zero—an all-but-impossible goal in practice—would reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the food system by only about 5 percent, equivalent to driving 1,000 miles less over the course of a year. By comparison, replacing red meat and dairy with chicken, fish, or eggs for one day per week would save the equivalent of driving 760 miles per year. Replacing red meat and dairy with vegetables one day a week would be like driving 1,160 miles less. "Thus," they write, "we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household's food-related climate footprint than 'buying local.'" However, Weber acknowledges, "these calculations were done assuming that local foods are no different than non-local foods." And that's not always the case. For example, local food advocates also emphasize eating seasonal (often meaning field-grown) and less processed foods. Those qualities, along with shorter distances from farm to table, will also contribute to lower emissions compared to the "average" diet.

The Benefits of Organic and Sustainable Farming
Food marketed in the local food economy—at farmers' markets and through community supported agriculture (CSA) schemes—is frequently also organic. Organic food often (though not always) is associated with lower greenhouse gas emissions than conventionally grown food, because organics don't generate the emissions associated with production, transport, and application of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Organic food also has other environmental benefits; less use of toxic chemicals promotes greater farmland biodiversity, and organic fields require less irrigation under some conditions. Because local food is so frequently talked about in terms of food miles, its environmental benefits have largely been couched in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. But food's carbon footprint "can't be the only measuring stick of environmental sustainability," notes Gail Feenstra, a food systems analyst at the University of California, Davis's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program. Finally, farmers who market locally are often relatively small in scale and can more feasibly adopt environmentally beneficial practices such as growing a diversity of crops, planting cover crops, leaving weedy field borders or planting hedgerows that provide a refuge for native biodiversity, and integrating crop and livestock production. In short, Weber says, "the production practices matter a lot more than where the food was actually grown. If buying local also means buying with better production practices then that's great, that's going to make a huge difference." Of course, the relationship between local food marketing and sustainable agricultural practices is far from perfect. A small farmer can still spray pesticides and plow from road to road. Not all farmers' market vendors are organic. Clare Hinrichs, who calls herself an "ardent" farmers' market shopper, nevertheless acknowledges that "the actual consequences—both intended or unintended—[of local food systems] haven't really been all that closely or systematically studied."

Organic food also has other environmental benefits; less use of toxic chemicals promotes greater farmland biodiversity, and organic fields require less irrigation under some conditions.

The Farmer and Consumer Relationship
So, is local food greener? Not necessarily. But look at the question from the opposite direction: If you're a consumer interested in greener food, the local food economy is currently a good place to find it. By the same token, a farmer who sells in the local food economy might be more likely to adopt or continue sustainable practices in order to meet this customer demand. If local food has environmental benefits, they aren't all—or perhaps even mainly—intrinsic to localness. Or, as Hinrichs has written, "it is the social relation, not the spatial location, per se, that accounts for this outcome." For local food advocates like Sage Van Wing, that interaction between producer and consumer, between farmer and eater, is precisely the point. Regarding food miles, Van Wing says, "I'm not interested in that at all." For her, purchasing an apple isn't about the greenhouse gas emissions involved in producing and transporting the fruit, "it's also about how those apples were farmed, how the farm workers were treated"—a broad array of ecological, social, and economic factors that add up to sustainability. Interacting directly with the farmer who grows her food creates a "standard of trust," she says. Christopher Weber, who followed a vegan diet for ten years and calls himself "somewhat of a self-proclaimed foodie," agrees: "That's one thing that's really great about local food, and one of the reasons that I buy locally, is because you can actually know your farmer and know what they're doing." Van Wing says that her approach to local food has evolved over time—she started out trying to eat within a 100-mile radius, but now she simply tries to get each food item from the closest source feasible. Foods that can't be grown nearby are either rare treats or have disappeared from her diet altogether. "I just don't do things that don't make sense," she says. Her statement echoes journalist and sustainable-agriculture guru Michael Pollan, who in his recent book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto offers a commonsense guide to eating ethically and well: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." You could sum up the ecological case for eating locally by adding one more sentence: "Mostly what's in season and grown not too far away." What if a greater investment in rail infrastructure helped to reverse the trend toward transporting more food by inefficient semitrucks?

Additional Considerations to Local Eating
Yet there are limits to this commonsense approach. In many areas, the climate is such that eating local, seasonal, field-grown produce would be a pretty bleak proposition for much of the year. Large concentrations of people live in areas not suited to growing certain staple crops; it's one thing to forego bananas, but quite another to give up wheat. And population density itself works against re-localization of the food system. Most of the land within 100 miles of large cities such

as New York is itself very built up; where will the farmland to feed us all locally come from? (By the same token, that very situation makes preservation of what farmland remains all the more important, a goal that buying from local farmers can help advance.) In this sense, life cycle analyses of the current food system offer a paradoxically hopeful perspective, because they suggest that, if the goal is to improve the environmental sustainability of the food system as a whole, then there are a variety of public policy levers that we can pull. To be sure, promoting more localized food production and distribution networks would reduce transport emissions. But what if a greater investment in rail infrastructure helped to reverse the trend toward transporting more food by inefficient semitrucks? What if fuel economy standards were increased for the truck fleet that moves our food? Or, to name one encompassing possibility, what if a carbon-pricing system incorporated some of the environmental costs of agriculture that are currently externalized? Local food is delicious, but the problem—and perhaps the solution—is global.

Further Readings
Books
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Geoff AndrewsThe Slow Food Story: Politics and Pleasure. Montreal, Quebec: McGillQueen's University Press, 2008. Lou BendrickEat Where You Live: How to Find and Enjoy Fantastic Local and Sustainable Food No Matter Where You Live. Seattle, WA: Skipstone, 2008. Samuel FromartzOrganic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books, 2006. Brian HalweilEat Here: Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. Daniel ImhoffFood Fight: The Citizen's Guide to a Food and Farm Bill. Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2007. Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp, and Camille KingsolverAnimal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Gaston T. LaBue, ed.Hunger in America: Issues and Assistance. New York: Nova Science Publishing, Inc., 2009. James E. McWilliamsJust Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2009. Gary Paul NabhanComing Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Michael PollanIn Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008. Michael PollanThe Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006. Jill RichardsonRecipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. Brooklyn, NY: Ig Publishing, 2009. Joel SalatinEverything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front. Swoope, VA: Polyface, 2007. Peter Singer and Jim MasonThe Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. New York: Rodale, 2006.

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Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnonPlenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.

Periodicals
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Brita Belli "Local Is the New Organic," E: The Environmental Magazine, March 2007. Javier Blas and Jenny Wiggins "Food Companies Put Sustainability on the Menu," Financial Times, November 12, 2009. Grace Lee Boggs "Food for All: How to Grow Democracy: Detroit's 'Quiet Revolution,'" Nation, September 21, 2009. Marian Burros "How to Eat (and Read) Close to Home," New York Times, August 29, 2007. John Cloud "Eating Better Than Organic," Time, March 2, 2007. Gilbert M. Gaul and Dan Morgan "A Slow Demise in the Delta: U.S. Farm Subsidies Favor Big over Small, White over Black," Washington Post, June 20, 2007. Pallavi Gogoi "Innovation on the Farm," BusinessWeek, May 21, 2008. www.buinessweek.com. Jerry Hagstrom "Farm Bill Provided Roots for Local Food Promotion Effort," Congress Daily AM, October 20, 2009. Rich Heffern "Healthy Eating vs. Feeding the World: Our Food System Figures into Health Care Reform Debate," National Catholic Reporter, October 30, 2009. Michael Hill "As Local Food Gains, Local Planners Face Decisions," Associated Press, November 4, 2009. Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry "A 50-Year Farm Bill," New York Times, January 4, 2009. Paul D. Johnson "Voting with Your Fork: There Are Good Reasons for Buying Organic and Local," National Catholic Reporter, August 21, 2009. Renée Johnson "What Is the Farm Bill?" CRS Report for Congress, September 23, 2008. Hugh Joseph "A Pro-Food Farm Bill," Boston Globe, July 9, 2007. Corby Kummer "Graze Locally: Shoppers Are Finding More Ways to Buy Humanely Raised Meat from Close-to-Home Farms," Atlantic, May 1, 2009. Terra Lawson-Remer "The U.S. Farm Bill and the Global Food Crisis," Huffington Post, May 29, 2008. James E. McWilliams "The Locavore Myth: Why Buying from Nearby Farmers Won't Save the Planet," Forbes, August 3, 2009. Ann Monroe "The Cost of Eating Green," MSN Money, December 17, 2007. Lindsey Nair "Local Food Movement Still Gaining Momentum," Roanoke Times (Roanoke, VA), September 13, 2009. Plenty "Some Interesting Locavore Statistics," March 24, 2009. www.plentymag.com. Michael Pollan "You Are What You Grow," New York Times Magazine, April 22, 2007. Terry Pristin "With a Little Help, Greens Come to Low-Income Neighborhoods," New York Times, June 16, 2009. Paul Roberts "Farming for Real," Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2009. Margot Roosevelt "Local-Food Movement: The Lure of the 100-Mile Diet," Time, June 12, 2006. Elizabeth Royte "And on Your Left, a Grass-Fed Cow," OnEarth, Fall 2007.

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Sally Schuff "USDA Lists Farm Bill Priorities," Feedstuffs, April 20, 2009. Kim Severson "When 'Local' Makes It Big," New York Times, May 12, 2009. Joseph B. Treaster "United Nations Food Leader on Defeating Hunger," Huffington Post, November 28, 2009. Bryan Walsh "Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food," Time, August 21, 2009. Yvonne Zipp "The School Lunchroom Grows Green," Christian Science Monitor, May 29, 2009.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2010 Greenhaven Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning.

Source Citation
DeWeerdt, Sarah. "Local Food Is Not Necessarily Better for the Environment." The Local Food Movement. Amy Francis. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2010. At Issue. Rpt. from "Is Local Food Better? Yes, Probably—But Not in the Way Many People Think." World Watch Magazine 22.3 (May-June 2009): 6-10. Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Web. 23 Feb. 2013. Document URL http://ic.galegroup.com.ezproxy.apollolibrary.com/ic/ovic/ViewpointsDetailsPage/ViewpointsDe tailsWindow?failOverType=&query=&prodId=OVIC&windowstate=normal&contentModules= &mode=view&displayGroupName=Viewpoints&limiter=&currPage=&disableHighlighting=tru e&displayGroups=&sortBy=&source=&search_within_results=&zid=&action=e&catId=&activi tyType=&scanId=&documentId=GALE%7CEJ3010722208&userGroupName=uphoenix&jsid= 18381c53c9737e7af322949a17701c5c Gale Document Number: GALE|EJ3010722208