No New Hope
In the last part of this series, we’re going to look at farmer’s markets, and locally-grown produce in general. It seems, at first blush, to be a Very Good Thing, and you have to really look for criticism of it.
Farmer’s Markets
Or, Oh No, Is That Another Distribution Center?
So far, we’ve examined only the potential health effects (or not) of organic and GMO-free food, but proponents also point to the efficiency of growing food locally as a potential benefit. When you eat a potato that was grown locally, that means it didn’t have to spend days on a truck, burning unnecessary fuel as it made its way to your mouth. Less hydrocarbon fuels burned, less crap in the atmosphere, fresher and therefore probably better-tasting food. What’s not to love?
The math. The inescapable, dreaded math.
There’s a large number of considerations to be taken into account when discussing something like food production, because there are many complex and varied processes taking place between the actual seed going into the ground and the finished product ending up on your plate, and all these processes vary depending on the crop or meat being produced, and location, and climate, and a billion other variables. It’s not just as simple as saying “locally-grown is better” and leaving it at that. The world is not that simple.
The Travelling salesman problem is an intensely difficult problem in mathematics, and regards finding the shortest available route that visits each point on a map exactly once and then returns to the origin, or “city”. There’s a cool bit of free software created by Michael LaLena that uses a genetic algorithm to solve the problem, available at http://www.lalena.com/AI/Tsp/. (.NET 2.0 required) You can draw dozens, or hundred of dots, and the software generates a random route, then tries successive iterations until it finds the shortest between them.
Now, let’s imagine the logistical details of a farmer’s market that follows the model most people think of when they think of a farmer’s market: the farmer brings his wares to the market, then the consumer comes to buy it. Imagine the spokes of a wheel, with say 20 farmers who all drive their wares to the market every day (or weekend, or whatever) and then drive back to complete the round trip. Now apply the traveling salesman problem to this map, and it becomes immediately clear that this is in fact the least efficient model of delivery. To correct this inefficiency, the farmer’s market should send one truck to all the farmers on a single pre-calculated route, pick up their produce, bring it to the market, and then discard or donate whatever food is left. (Why drive perishables back to the farmer?) It’s immediately obvious that this cuts down the number of miles driven dramatically.
Alternatively, consider a grocery chain that you want to buy locally-grown produce at, that wants to add more locations. Adding a store in a new town means finding a farmer that produces that type of crop nearby. This doesn’t always work – farms are usually located between towns, not in them. So you can either send a truck from each store to the farmer (inefficient) or combine routes, and if you have closely-clustered stores, add a distribution center. This adds time to the process, but will cut down on mileage tremendously.
Compare this to the rat’s nest of crisscrossing routes for farmer’s markets and the inefficiency of direct delivery between farm and store becomes crystal clear. If you want to cut down on carbon being spewed into the atmosphere, eliminating all the driving that you can is the simplest and quickest way to make that a reality.
Native growing conditions
Another thing to consider is native growing conditions. I personally love oranges, and grew up eating a steady diet of citrus fruits, but I lived in Iowa, where it gets very, very cold in the winter, too cold for citrus trees to survive. So our oranges came from elsewhere, like Florida. Why? Because it’s warmer there year-round, and citrus trees flourish in the soil and environment.
Of course, it’s possible that retailers prefer buying coffee from Kenya and fruit from South Africa because their production method consists of some child-labor pollutant-spewing god-awful mercury-in-the-groundwater harvesting or growing process, and the retailer doesn’t mind spewing millions of tons of diesel fumes into the air because they’re still turning a profit. And while that might be true in some cases (if you want to criticize food production on humanitarian grounds, look no further than growing chocolate with child slaves in the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire) But these examples would be the exception, not the rule: the vast majority of the time, food is cheaper from those countries because the native growing conditions are better. Tomatoes flourish easily in Spain, but require heated greenhouses in the UK. Or consider the example of citrus being grown closer to the equator and shipped north and south. The overall energy to ship tomatoes from Spain, for instance, is actually less than would be required to grow them in greenhouses in the UK1.
Though he’s not mentioned (That I can remember) in Food Fight, Joel Salatin features heavily in another film in the same stripe, Food Inc, where he’s promoted as some sort of maverick awesome superfarmer. Joel bills himself as a “holistic farmer”, and raises his animals on pasture only, outdoors as much as possible, and slaughters his chickens in the open, farm-fresh air, while spouting all the time that the FDA inspectors fail to find the higher salmonella counts they expected.
Joel has a rule about his meat: he won’t ship it to you; in the interests of attaining as small a carbon footprint as possible, he requires customers to come pick it up from him. Now, Joel certainly has the environment’s best interests in mind, but he clearly has not thought this through very much. He’s opted for a feel-good sound-bite rule that will potentially put hundreds of cars and trucks on the road to come get his boutique beef.
Further, he uses an enormous amount of land for his cattle, considering comparable conventional farms nearby in the very fertile Shenandoah Valley. This wasteful land usage is great for high-end boutique-y meats and produce, but is clearly not going to work to feed the world. Let’s say you live in Britain, and want some sheep products. According to the New York Times:
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 yet, we still hear people greenwashing their arguments in support of people like Salatin, when the truth is that Salatin’s customers burn way more gas per pound of beef delivered than do Wal-Mart’s container shipments from New Zealand. Why? The math doesn’t lie, it’s a huge net energy savings.
Series Conclusions
The main point I want to hammer home in doing this series is “reject the false dichotomy of local/organic vs conventional”. We can all do a better job feeding ourselves and the planet when we do away with mental shortcuts that do nothing but over-simplify difficult problems.
The science is clear: organic produce is not healthier, it will not make you live longer, and conventional produce will not harm you. But are there things that both sides can learn? Certainly. We can continue to integrate practices from both modalities into a cohesive best practice that we can use to feed our growing world population. We can learn to stop fearing genetically-modified organisms. We can learn to treat the animals we eat better, and make the meat safer.
We can learn to stop fearing science, stop parroting feel-good-but-inaccurate statements about locally-grown produce and meat, and instead look at the science (and math!) have to say, and go from there. For in so doing, we will not only be more intellectually honest, we’ll learn something and make life better for everyone in the process.
Exit, stage left
Sparks
1: Comparative life-cycle assessment of food commodities procured for UK consumption through a diversity of supply chains, United Kingdom Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs