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I was glad to see the food miles metric[1] tangentially mentioned in this post (when she talked about importing exotic foods to keep herself healthy). This is a

by kwantam 16y ago

I was glad to see the food miles metric[1] tangentially mentioned in this post (when she talked about importing exotic foods to keep herself healthy). This is a notion that, in my opinion, doesn't get enough attention: it doesn't matter how great the farming practices are if the food is then shipped three thousand miles to my door. (Yes, the food miles notion is imperfect, but it's at least a reasonable first-order approximation of the environmental impact of your food.) Besides being fun, one of the best things about hunting is that you can directly observe the cost of transporting and processing food from animal to table. On top of that, the animal I hunt most frequently (feral hog) is a depredating pest in most of the southeastern US, doing substantial damage to farm and ranch land. Most of my hunting is done on land where cows are pastured, and I'm only happy to help reduce the population of hogs, protect the grazing lands, and get a little meat out of the deal. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_miles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_miles

cjbprime 16y ago
> it doesn't matter how great the farming practices are if the food is then shipped three thousand miles to my door. (Yes, the food miles notion is imperfect, but it's at least a reasonable first-order approximation of the environmental impact of your food.) I don't think so. Transportation accounts for only 11% of the environmental impact of food[1], so that's not a first-order approximation of the true cost at all. It is not only possible, but is in fact often likely, that shipping food three thousand miles from somewhere where it was efficient to produce has less environmental impact than buying food with epsilon "food miles". (Which means that the take-home message is: if you want to use food miles as a metric, you should generally only buy food that is grown as efficiently where you are as in the part of the world that grows it optimally.) [1] http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es702969f http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es702969f

by kwantam 16y ago

cjbprime 16y ago

> it doesn't matter how great the farming practices are if the food is then shipped three thousand miles to my door. (Yes, the food miles notion is imperfect, but it's at least a reasonable first-order approximation of the environmental impact of your food.) I don't think so. Transportation accounts for only 11% of the environmental impact of food[1], so that's not a first-order approximation of the true cost at all. It is not only possible, but is in fact often likely, that shipping food three thousand miles from somewhere where it was efficient to produce has less environmental impact than buying food with epsilon "food miles". (Which means that the take-home message is: if you want to use food miles as a metric, you should generally only buy food that is grown as efficiently where you are as in the part of the world that grows it optimally.) [1] http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es702969f http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es702969f