Buying locally grown food can put interesting, wholesome meals on people’s dinner tables, but spreading populations across arable regions at densities low enough to make even part-time agricultural self-sufficiency feasible would be an environmental and economic disaster.
Locavorism is appealing as an environmental strategy because it permits its practitioners to believe they’re doing good for the world by doing well for themselves, and to recast their own consumption and nutrition preferences as contributions to humanity. But the distance that a particular food item travels between its grower and its ultimate consumer is not an accurate measure of the amount of energy that was required to put it on the table, or of any other environmental impacts; far more significant factors are how the food item was grown, how it was irrigated, which pesticides were applied to it, how it got where it was going, and what else was traveling with it.
The California raspberries I buy at my local grocery store have a smaller carbon footprint, per berry, than the locally grown raspberries my wife and I picked recently at a farm just a couple of towns away, because the California raspberries crossed the country in a shipment containing tons of other produce, and therefore represent a minute expenditure of fuel per berry, while the local raspberries were obtained by my wife and me during a thirty-mile round trip in a car whose only other cargo was ourselves. There is no sense in which my preference for local raspberries represents a gain for the environment, since the energy expenditure and carbon output per unit of food were vastly higher for the local berries than they were for the ones originating 3,000 miles away.
The weakness of locavorism as a global environmental principle is easy to see if you extend it beyond the kitchen. One of the most passionate advocates of local, small-scale agriculture has been the author Michael Pollan. His excellent, thought-provoking book The Omnivore’s Dilemma has sold many thousands of copies all over the world, and those copies have been shipped at least as many miles as the food on the shelves in your grocery store (and usually in far smaller batches, using less efficient conveyances), yet no author, Pollan included, would argue that readers should buy only books produced within a few dozen miles of where they live, and on locally-manufactured paper.
Likewise with clothes and appliances and oil and everything else we consume. (How are the locally-produced hybrid cars in your neighborhood?) Global trade can actually reduce carbon output, by concentrating production in the places where production is the most efficient. Pollan makes a passionate, persuasive case for a radical transformation of American agriculture and for the elimination of the ill-considered government subsidies that have helped to turn many of the most common American foodstuffs into nutritional simulacra, but nothing could be less sustainable than a world whose six-billion-and-counting residents had to rely totally or even mainly on locally-produced anything.
Shipping foodstuffs and other goods long distances—from areas of abundance to areas of need—will become more important, not less, as the world’s energy-and-emissions difficulties deepen.
An excellent new book on this subject: Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, by James E. McWilliams.
