Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

There has been a big push to “Buy Local” food. I was told that it’s better for the environment because it costs so much fuel to ship food. It turns out that might not be true. According to this article from Financial Times, the cost of growing the food far outstrips the cost of shipping it.

• FT.com / Home UK / UK – Planes, brains and automobiles

They explain the theory behind eating locally:

Today, of course, the “question of transportation” has become caught up in worries about the quantities of carbon dioxide being generated by an increasingly mobile food supply. The further our food travels, so the theory goes, the more damage it does to the climate through transport-related carbon dioxide emissions. In short, globetrotting food stands accused of helping destroy the planet.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple:

“Transport has been taken out and highlighted,” says Rebecca White, a researcher at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI). “But you can’t single out one part [of the food system] and say something that’s come from thousands of miles away is automatically less sustainable – it’s much more complicated than that.”

Ken Green headed a team of researchers at the Manchester Business School. They were hired by Great Britain’s Defra (Department of Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs) to determine whether transportation is a factor in the environment:

After 199 pages of detail on everything from automatic picking machines to consumer packaging, the researchers find no strong evidence that locally sourced foods are better, in environmental terms at least, than global produce – and in some cases the opposite is true.

In fact, WE have more of an impact than how far away food is shipped:

And it turns out our own part in the chain is often the most damaging, since when we drive to the supermarket, we might come back with only a few of bags of food in the car boot. Such a trip is far less fuel efficient than the one taken by that same food on its way to the supermarket in a truck packed with the assistance of load-optimisation software, which determines how to stack cargo so that barely an inch of empty space is left in the back of the vehicle.

In the end, “Buy Local” has less impact on the environment than we thought. Now it seems to be solely an economic entreaty.

Via: Determining the amount of energy it takes to bring food from… (kottke.org)