Mar 24 2009

Get Out Your Calculator Before You Eat

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

The San Francisco Bay Area is Ground Zero of the local food movement.  In 2005, a group calling itself Locavores challenged local residents to eat only food produced within a 100 mile radius of their home. Only two years later, their name was added to the Oxford American Dictionary as 2007 Word of the Year. 

There are lots of reasons to eat locally produced food, including freshness and to preserve farm-based greenbelts, but the most widely cited reason is to cut down on "food miles," the environmentally costly transportation of meat, fruits and vegetables thousands of miles by truck, ship and plane to your local supermarket.

But even if you are a committed Locavore, how should you buy your food? Should you drive to local farms? Should you drive to a farmer's market, to which sellers converge by truck from throughout the region? Or should you subscribe to a service that drops off organic produce at your door?

A recent study from the University of Exeter in the UK finds that less fuel is generally burned when customers take home deliveries of vegetable boxes than when they travel to their local farm shops. Although delivery vans may travel a couple of hundred miles to service their routes, they can schedule travel much more efficiently than individual customers who travel four miles or more to market.

The Bay Area is served by numerous deliverers of organic produce, such as Planet Organics, Farm Fresh to You and Spud (these are listed as examples, not recommendations). Customers may suffer sticker shock when they see the prices, but a handy calculator may convince you that the time and fuel saved on shopping makes it all worthwhile.

Food delivery may become even more efficient if a new web-based tool called FarmsReach catches on. It's designed to help producers and buyers find each other, prepare optimal delivery schedules and arrange payments.

Said Melanie Cheng, founder of FarmsReach, "While we're not there yet, it's easy to see a day when a farmer uses an iPhone to track picklists, get driving directions, accept orders and so on. Ten years ago, this was proprietary technology for companies like Fedex--now, with a website and a phone, it's in the hands of a local farmer."

All that's well and good, but as earnest consumers learn more about the economics and environmental impact of the food business, they risk becoming hopelessly confused.

For example, the New York Times cited a research study that found that "lamb raised on New Zealand's clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard."

And an informal survey by Salon magazine last year of the farmers market at San Francisco's Ferry Plaza found that traditional wholesalers probably produce fewer carbon dioxide emissions per pound of apples, oranges, lettuce and greens than farm stall operators.

The author admitted that a full calculation--taking into account all lifecycle energy costs including fertilization, refrigeration and a host of other factors--might have changed the results, but it would take a massive study to know for sure.

All of which suggests, to me at least, that ethical consumers will be much better off when carbon emissions are finally priced correctly, either with a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade market. All the hidden costs of fossil fuels in the production of food (and every other product) will finally be incorporated in the final sales price. Then we can, in good conscience, go back to buying our food based on freshness, nutrition, and visual appeal rather than pulling out our environmental calculators every time we buy a strawberry.

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