Local v. Organic, Again
Not that this is new news to those of us who work in the local food movement, but this piece in the NYTimes raises a few sticky questions:
Here are a couple of other puzzlers: Are canned tomatoes a better environmental choice in the winter than fresh tomatoes from abroad? If a product that contains heavy packaging reduces the amount of food waste, is that a better choice than one that is lightly packed and spoils quicker?
And there's so many more - does a carton of strawberries driven 20 miles in a gas-guzzler old pickup truck have a smaller or larger carbon footprint than a carton of strawberries flown or trucked in from hundreds of miles away? If you drive to the farmers' market in your car, do you negate all of the benefits of buying local? How is anybody supposed to be able to make the 'right' decision at the grocery store?
At some point, the ethical maze can make you dizzy. But there was one line of inquiry from the California researchers that hit particularly close to home: the carbon impact of shoppers themselves.Some people walk or take the subway to buy their groceries and then compost what they don’t use. But, let’s face it, most of us drive and toss the leftovers into the garbage disposal or the garbage can. In doing so, we may be contributing nearly a quarter of the greenhouse gases associated with our food, research has shown.
Ouch.
I'm interested to see the final results from the research that's described in this article. I and a lot of other people across the country are putting a lot of time and energy into re-localizing food systems, and we damn well want to make sure we do it right and don't cause more problems than we solve.