Food Miles Apart

Give Ronald Bailey, Reason magazine's science writer, some credit for being open to persuasion. He may once have characterized the notion of global warming as a "scam," but he later relented in the face of overwhelming evidence that the earth is heating up.

So he may also be willing to change his view that "food miles"—the attempt to measure how many miles food travels from farm to table—is a silly concept.

In some applications, it is silly. Reductionists among the environmental set tend to attach too much importance to food miles. For instance, they ignore the fact that it is sometimes better for the environment to ship food across the globe than it is to grow it locally.

But the answer to a reductionist argument from one side shouldn't be a reductionist argument from the other.

For "some activists," Bailey wrote earlier this month, "eating local foods is no longer just a pleasure—it is a moral obligation."

And moral obligations have no place in the bloodless world of libertarianism, where arguments that individual behaviors can harm the common good are often dismissed as clueless whining from shrill nanny-staters.

"Food miles," Bailey wrote this month, "are supposed to be a simple way to gauge food's impact on climate change."

Not exactly. Measuring food miles is one way to gauge food's impact on climate change. It is a single factor that must be measured against other factors, such as how much nitrogen fertilizer is used to produce a given product.

Further, environmental concern is just one reason to promote eating locally grown foods. There are also good social and economic reasons for doing so.

And there are also good reasons for sometimes not doing so. For instance, as Bailey notes, many developing economies depend on food exports. And sometimes those exports actually harm the environment less than the same foods grown locally in importing countries.

Bailey writes:

Food miles advocates fail to grasp the simple idea that food should be grown where it is most economically advantageous to do so. Relevant advantages consist of various combinations of soil, climate, labor, capital, and other factors. It is possible to grow bananas in Iceland, but Costa Rica really has the better climate for that activity.

That's true, but are Icelanders really eating a lot of locally grown bananas?

Better is Marion Nestle's example from her book What to Eat. McDonald's, she noted, recently promoted its new salads in Norway, which included carrots grown in Bakersfield, Calif., more than 7,000 miles away. "They can't grow carrots any place closer?" she wondered.

Of course they can, and they do. McDonald's, no doubt because it benefits from its economies of scale, simply chooses to ship them in. But, Nestle writes, "Unless the cold chain is working perfectly and the travel time is short, the trade-off will be in freshness and taste." Not to mention the effect on the local farm economies in Norway and, perhaps, the impact on global warming.  

The bottom line is that both sides of this argument tend to put too much emphasis on food miles. Relying on them as a simple indicator of how "sustainable" a given food is isn't a good idea. But neither is blithely writing them off as meaningless.