> He shows how the concept of 'food miles' is based on a lot of faulty
> assumptions - really just a number pulled out of thin air. He talks about
> the growing body of research that shows that, as an example, locavore
> practices (which require driving to the farm market, to the orchard, and to
> a dry goods store to buy items you can't get on the farm) actually produce a
> bigger carbon footprint than the typical shopper who shops once a week.
> McWilliams shows that the really high carbon foot print for some food is
> actually in the production (where the real savings could be found with
> different methods) and a tiny fraction is in the transport. The scientists
> studying these things use LCAs - Life Cycle Assessments which is a far more
> complex and accurate way to gauge carbon footprint, but which can't be
> reduced to happy little slogans like "eat your view."
A fair amount of New Zealand's scientific energy has gone into debunking 'food miles', for obvious reasons. From a 2007 NYT piece:
"Most notably, they found that 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. Similar figures were found for dairy products and fruit.
"These life-cycle measurements are causing environmentalists worldwide to rethink the logic of food miles. New Zealand’s most prominent environmental research organization, Landcare Research-Manaaki Whenua, explains that localism “is not always the most environmentally sound solution if more emissions are generated at other stages of the product life cycle than during transport.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/opinion/06mcwilliams.html