For some reason, a group of people on this earth have convinced themselves that food-miles, or the distance food had to travel from the farm to the table, is somehow relevant to the environment. Food-miles is one of the best examples of the very common environmental practice of looking at a single factor out of context of the entire system. I have written about the food-miles stupidity before.
We actually have a name for the system in which food-miles are reduced to their theoretical minimum: Subsistence farming. It used to be that most food was grown just a few feet from the table where it was eventually eaten because nearly everyone was a subsistence farmer (or hunter or gatherer). We abandoned this system, and thereby increased food miles, for a number of reasons:
- It is very inefficient, not just from labor inputs but from a land use standpoint as well. Some places are well suited to potato or rice production and others are less so. It makes a ton of sense to grow things on soils and in climates where they are well-suited rather than locally everywhere.
- It doesn't work very well in a lot of areas. Subsistence farming here in Arizona is not very practical, and would use a ton of water
- It leads to starvation. Even rich countries like France were experiencing periodic famines just 150 years ago or so.
But the main reason food miles and local subsistance farming is stupid is that it has nothing to do with environmental health. Everyone looks at the energy to transport food, but no one looks at the extra energy cost (not to mention the land use cost) of growing food locally in climates and soils to which the food is not well-suited. To this point:
European consumers shunning imported food supposedly to limit climate
change should not make African farmers a scapegoat, a Brussels
conference has been told.
In Britain, several supermarkets have
begun labelling products flown into the country with stickers marked
"air-freighted," to reflect concern about the contribution of aviation
to global warming.
But Benito MÃ¼ller, a director at the Oxford
Institute for Energy Studies, dismissed the concept of food miles as
"an extremely oversimplified indicator" of ecological impact.
he was "really angry" with the implicit message that agricultural
produce from Africa should be avoided, MÃ¼ller claimed that less
greenhouse gas emissions are often emitted from the cultivation and
transport of such goods than they would be if grown in Europe.
imported from Kenya during the winter, he maintained, have a lower
"carbon footprint," a measure to ascertain the effect of a method of
production on the environment "” than those grown in a heated British
greenhouse, even when their transport by air from Africa is taken into