dieting feet

[the_siobhan]

Buying food from local sources is getting a lot of press lately, to the point that Axe & I heard a CBC feature on it while we were in the car. Which led to a conversation about the comparative benefits of eating an omnivorous but local diet vs eating vegetarian/vegan if your goal is to reduce your carbon footprint.

We're trying to reduce the amount of meat in our diet. But is it really helping if we cut down on the meat we buy - all raised in Southern Ontario - and replace it with vegetables shipped from all over the world?

(Of course the ideal is to go vegan and eat only locally grown organic foods, but just for the sake of argument.)

Comments

[trystbat.livejournal.com]

Apropos of nothing -- ICON LOVE!

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Thanks. :-)

[kat1031.livejournal.com]

That's actually one of the things I hate most about living in Vegas... we can't get local produce. Everything we eat is shipped in from somewhere else.

[50-ft-queenie.livejournal.com]

I recently switched my bi-weekly fruit and veggie box from a small organic box to a local harvest box. Some of the produce is organic as well as being grown locally.

I heard David Suzuki speak recently, and he recommended locally grown over organic if a choice has to be made, with locally grown organic being obviously the best choice.

[heresiarch.livejournal.com]

my ideal diet is plant-based with modest amounts of meat and dairy. i think raising animals can be sustainable as long as it's done on a small scale. the CSA we belonged to in Massachusetts was biodynamic, and they emphasized the importance of having a farm in which animals and plants were raised together, mimicking natural cycles to maintain the soil's fertility. the cows, for example, will graze a fallow field down to the stalks, while pigs will turn the soil, and both will fertilize it with manure, as long as you move them around (michael pollan describes a similar routine of pasturing animals in his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma).

from my perspective, large scale agribusiness is the problem, whether it's factory farmed meat and dairy, conventional produce in the Central Valley (California), or endless soy and corn fields in Iowa.

still, i wonder how it's possible to feed all of North America on locally grown food only. how long is the growing season in Ontario? i'm all for reducing overpopulation as well, but i think we'll have to find a way to adapt sustainable production to meet the needs of large, mostly metropolitan populations.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Our growing season is comparable to what you would have experienced when you live in Mass. Southern Ontario has tons of farmland, so it would be pretty easy to live a primarily vegetarian diet in the summer/fall. Winter and spring is when it would be tough.

I agree with your assessment of agribusiness.

[lilactime.livejournal.com]

Meat production is always going to use more resources than vegetable production, regardless of shipping issues. Having said that, there are plenty of local farmers producing organic, grass-fed meat if you still want a bit in your diet.

One of my writers did a piece recently about a service she uses where she gets 20 pounds of grass-fed beef at a time. The farmer delivers it to the city once a month or so. She picks it up in a parking lot at Bloor & Ossington.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

We already do that. That was the point of the discussion, are we really reducing our impact if we go from local organic meat to imported non-meat.

[lilactime.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see.

My understanding is that it's really not calculable. There's a reference to calculating food miles in The Omnivore's Dilemma and unless you know exactly where stuff comes from and what went into it, there's no way to figure precisely. The calculations done by the person in the book (not Michael Pollan but someone he interviews) determine that for the food he was eating, it's about even. If you were comparing local meat vs. local veg, then it would be obvious, but local meat vs. imported veg, my guess would be that they're fairly evenly matched in terms of impact.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

I read somewhere that roughly 80% of the cost of typical produce in standard grocery stores is transportation-related (either real expense or profit-taking by shipping firms). I'm not sure how that corresponds to carbon footprint per se, but I'd imagine that it's really close to 1:1, since we quit shipping by sail and haven't gotten the teleporters up to speed yet.

[grimjim.livejournal.com]

Did this article prompt the CBC feature? As consumers, we typically don't have the figures required to analyze the carbon footprint of various supply chains. Sometimes importing results in a smaller carbon footprint if the local production technique and/or shipment is less efficient.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/03/nrgreen03.xml

I found a surprising claim here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/story/0,,2097263,00.html

Dr Andrea Collins from the Brass waste and resources research centre at Cardiff University and Dr Ruth Fairchild, a nutritional analyst at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, agree that the food miles concept is too simplistic. They argue that their recent research into the environmental impact of food points towards a better system of "ecological footprint" analysis. This measures a food's impact in "global hectares", the notional land area needed to provide the resources to produce it.

The research concluded that, on average, only around 2% of the environmental impact of food comes from transporting it from farm to shop.

"Our study was to investigate how much impact our food consumption has," says Fairchild. "Most people would be quite surprised that the biggest environmental impact of food is not because of food miles, but because of the processing it goes through."

The piece also compares the footprints of various meats.