Everybody’s Doin’ the Localmotion
Graphic by The 100-mile Diet
“Eat local” is a mantra I’ll never tire of pimpin’ for a myriad reasons, the principal of which is the concept of “food miles,” a measure of the distance your food travels to get from the farm to your plate. (The minimum distance that North American produce typically travels is 1,500 miles. Grapes can clock 2,143 miles to get from vineyards in California to markets in Chicago.) Because of the proportional increase in oil consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions, the higher the mileage on your food’s odometer, the greater its (and by extension, your) negative impact on the environment. Factor in the fuel needed to process, package, and preserve your food, and the plot thickens like molten molasses in a steel vat. Blame industrialization, world travel, and increasingly sophisticated taste buds. Or finger cheap overseas labor costs. However we got into this mess, the fact is that mounting food miles, in the face of a global peak-oil crisis, is an issue we ALL need to address.
A gent by the name of Chad Heeter considered the amount of crude oil hidden in his breakfast one morning in his small Berkeley, Calif. apartment. Using some numbers crunched out by eggheads from the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Heeter calculated that in eating his 400-calorie breakfast of oatmeal, frozen raspberries, and coffee, he had effectively consumed 2,800 calories of fossil fuel energy. Or more than 2 quarts of crude oil. Yowza!
Hetter concludes:
What I eat for breakfast connects me to the planet, deep into its past with the fossilized remains of plants and animals which are now fuel, as well as into its future, when these non-renewable resources will likely be in scant supply. Maybe these thoughts are too grand to be having over breakfast, but I’m not the only one on the planet eating this morning. My meal traveled thousands of miles around the world to reach my plate. But then there’s the rise of perhaps 600 million middle-class Indians and Chinese. They’re already demanding the convenience of packaged meals and the taste of foreign flavors. What happens when middle-class families in India or China decide they want their Irish oats for breakfast, topped by organic raspberries from Chile? They’ll dip more and more into the planet’s communal oil well. And someday soon, we’ll all suck it dry.
Slashing food miles by eating locally produced, seasonal produce not only burns less fossil fuel, it can also cut emissions by as much as 90 percent, helping forestall the global climate change already in progress.
Putting their green sensibilities where their mouths were, Canadians Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon took on a “100-mile diet” by only eating food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius for an entire year. They’ve also launched 100MileDiet.org with the goal of turning “an idea into a movement.”
Meanwhile, Jennifer Maiser of Life Begins at 30 and the Bay Area Locavores are hosting the May 2006 Eat Local Challenge, which allows varying tiers of commitment, from going all out gung-ho native to planning a weekend picnic with local foods during the month.
Of course, joining a Community-Supported Agriculture program in your neighborhood is one of the best ways to get your hands on local fruits and veggies. Another favorite resource of mine is LocalHarvest.org, which helps you locate restaurants, farmers’ markets, CSAs, grocery/co-ops that offer sustainably grown food in your area.
Changing the way we eat requires personal fortitude and persistence, but the rewards are incalculable1. Now get down with your bad self and chow down!
1And if you can’t buy local, buy fair trade.
meranie said,
April 27, 2006 at 7:18 pm
I’ve enjoyed reading your journal for the past few weeks, but I have a bit of a beef with what you’re saying. The beef is that, well, I really like bananas, and I’ve never lived in a country where they’re seasonal. So, I just do without bananas? I’m pretty good at eating the local (vegetarian) food here (I live in Japan) and I buy what is on sale and at farmstands (that’s the ONLY way to survive), but if I were to do that, I’d have no access to fruit except in the winter months when mikan (they’re like clementine oranges) are available. Where do you draw the line? We’re not self-sufficient as humans, which is why we trade. Yes, we need more ecologically-sound ways of sustaining ourself and trade. But it’s really hard to have a balanced diet in places and times of year when your staple diet foods (fruits and vegetables) are not grown near you. Am I making sense?
By the way, I applaud your journal. I love how I can open your blog and learn something about the environment. Thank you for writing about the earth.
november said,
April 27, 2006 at 9:04 pm
hehe meranie, i agree that we cannot be self sufficient 100% so i believe that’s what jasmin was saying about “if you can’t buy local, buy fair trade”. i believe theres fairtrade bananas no?
anyway thanks for another great post, yet again. first read in the morning and it’s making me reflect mucho
Jasmin said,
April 28, 2006 at 10:02 am
(Breaking with tradition and replying here instead of via e-mail.)
Hey Meranie,
No one’s asking anyone to do the impossible. The best we all can aspire to is just to slash our food miles by as much as we can. Buying local (or closeby—getting bananas from the Philipines in your case, instead of, say, South America, would be more prudent), for those who have those products available to them, just happens to be the best way outside of growing produce yourself. And sometimes we’re not able to help it—I’m culturally predisposed to a rice-based diet, for instance, so not buying imported rice is not an option since we don’t grow the jasmine rice I’m accustomed to in the U.S. (Investigating fair-trade rice is on my to-do list, though.)
And here’s another personal example you might appreciate—I really, really love brown-rice crackers (with sprinklings of sesame seeds, yum) from Japan, but because I wanted to live more sustainably, I cut down what used to be a regular indulgence to having them maybe once a month instead. (And right now it’s a rare treat.) We all do whatever we can.
november hit it right on the head—if you can’t buy local, buy fair trade. So for people in the U.S. that includes coffee, tea, and chocolate, all of which have fair-trade options which guarantee that the farmers get a living wage for their efforts. I truly believe, after all, that “trade, not aid” is instrumental to alleviating world poverty and hunger. This is definitely an area we, as conscious consumers, can contribute.
Most of all, Meranie, you need to take care of yourself. So going without adequate nutrition during the winter months isn’t an option, either. There will always be compromises we’ll have to make. But we reduce what we _can_, offset what we can’t (contributing to renewable energy programs, e.g.), and encourage other people to tread lightly, too.
We’re all in this together.
Meg said,
April 28, 2006 at 7:56 pm
I’ve been reading your blog and thank you for raising my consciousness on many issues.
Thanks for mentioning Community Supported Agriculture and your link to Downtown Harvest.
I think that we illustrate your point above - that none of us can do it all, but all of us can make a difference. We are a small group of people who decided to try a relatively unknown concept. We know that we make a difference - people have made friendships with others in their community; our surplus and member donations help provide good food to people in need. By knowing our farmer, we deepen our appreciation of our food and we help to support the effort of sustainable agriculture and ultimately, stewardship of our earth.
We do this in a small way, but I feel that our effort is well invested.
Thank you for giving me plenty to consider!
Kimberly said,
April 30, 2006 at 3:32 am
I arrived here for the first time while reading about the eat local challenge, and wanted to comment on your statement the “we don’t grow rice in the U.S.”
Rice is grown in both Texas and California (and perhaps other states as well). Lundberg Farms grows a number of different varieties, much of it organic, and every variety that I’ve tried is delicious.
I’m trying to decide how far I’m willing to go in giving up foods that aren’t grown near Seattle. Fair trade coffee, here I come…
Jasmin said,
April 30, 2006 at 8:24 am
(Reposting my e-mailed reply here.)
Hi Kimberly,
Thanks for the heads up! I’ll have to investigate those options. I corrected my comment to clarify that we don’t grow “the jasmine rice I’m accustomed to” in the U.S. because of dips in temperature which halt their growth. Actually now that I think about it, I’ve had Carolina rice (I just checked its Web site, it is indeed grown in the U.S.) but it was kinda … um … yucky.
Thanks for correcting my mistaken belief, though! I might experiment some more.
The Worsted Witch » It’s Getting Hot in Here said,
May 2, 2006 at 3:27 pm
[...] 8. Consume consciously and reduce your food miles; buy less, and when you do, choose domestically produced products that don’t require a lot of packaging. Use your local library more or buy used. [...]
The Worsted Witch » Face Off, Naturally said,
May 31, 2006 at 3:23 pm
[...] Besides saving you money, homemade skin- and hair-care formulas also dispense with petroleum-based plastic packaging, which do add up, even for the most diligent of tree-huggers. (You might want to invest in a spray bottle or two in the beginning, however. Don’t reuse any containers that were filled with toxic chemicals before. In other words, chuck that used Windex bottle with the recyclables.) You also know exactly what you’re spreading across your skin without having to worry about synthetic additives or shelf-life-prolonging preservatives. And look, Ma, no extra food miles! [...]
The Worsted Witch » The Organic Myth? said,
October 6, 2006 at 12:25 pm
[...] Until that happens, I’ll continue to do the localmotion, and, where possible, making the choice for both local and organic. My food doesn’t need to travel more (and thus pollute more) than I do. [...]
The Worsted Witch » The Vegetable-Industrial Complex said,
October 15, 2006 at 11:05 am
[...] Pollan makes a case for eating local, not just because we want to support farmers in our communities and eat seasonal fresh food at their most flavorful—or even “sentimental” reasons such as wanting our children to recognize what real food in its natural, unpackaged glory looks like—but also for “hardheaded or pragmatic” reasons. Want to fight off a possible terrorist attack? Shop at your local farmers’ market or community-assisted-agriculture (CSA) program. highly centralized food economy is a dangerously precarious system, vulnerable to accidental—and deliberate—contamination. This is something the government understands better than most of us eaters. When Tommy Thompson retired from the Department of Health and Human Services in 2004, he said something chilling at his farewell news conference: “For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.” The reason it is so easy to do was laid out in a 2003 G.A.O. report to Congress on bioterrorism. “The high concentration of our livestock industry and the centralized nature of our food-processing industry” make them “vulnerable to terrorist attack.” Today 80 percent of America’s beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company. Keeping local food economies healthy—and at the moment they are thriving—is a matter not of sentiment but of critical importance to the national security and the public health, as well as to reducing our dependence on foreign sources of energy. [...]
The Worsted Witch » said,
July 10, 2007 at 5:47 pm
[...] Are you taking part in One Local Summer? Summertime and the local eating’s good. [...]