Text 418, 110 rader
Skriven 2010-08-20 19:52:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
Ärende: An interesting article
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From today's New York Times...

Math Lessons for Locavores By STEPHEN BUDIANSKY

IT'S 42 steps from my back door to the garden that keeps my family
supplied nine months of the year with a modest cornucopia. You'll get
no argument from me about the pleasures and advantages to the palate
and the spirit of eating what's local, fresh and in season.

But the local food movement now threatens to devolve into another
one of those self-indulgent and self-defeating do-gooder dogmas.
Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as
gospel by locavores, celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental
organizations. Words like sustainability and food-miles are
thrown around without any clear understanding of the larger picture.

The result has been all kinds of absurdities. For instance, it is
sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field
because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is
virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say,
the Hudson Valley. 

The statistics brandished by local-food advocates to support such
doctrinaire assertions are always selective, usually misleading and
often bogus particularly with respect to the energy costs of
transporting food. One popular and oft-repeated statistic is that it
takes 97 calories of fossil fuel energy to bring one calorie of
iceberg lettuce from California to the East Coast. That's an apples
and oranges (or maybe apples and rocks) comparison to begin with,
because you can't eat petroleum or burn iceberg lettuce.

It is also an almost complete misrepresentation of reality, as those
numbers reflect the entire energy cost of producing lettuce from
seed to dinner table, not just transportation. Studies have shown
that whether it's grown in California or Maine, or whether it's
organic or conventional, about 5,000 calories of energy go into one
pound of lettuce. Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers
are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds
next to nothing to the total energy bill. 

It takes about a tablespoon of diesel fuel to move one pound of
freight 3,000 miles by rail; that works out to about 100 calories of
energy. If it goes by truck, it's about 300 calories, still a
negligible amount in the overall picture. (For those checking the
calculations at home, these are "large" calories, or kilocalories,
the units used for food value.) Overall, transportation accounts for
about 14 percent of the total energy consumed by the American food
system. 

Other favorite targets of sustainability advocates include the
fertilizers and chemicals used in modern farming. But their share of
the food system's energy use is even lower, about 8 percent.

The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at
all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32
percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component
by far. 

A single 10-mile round trip by car to the grocery store or the
farmers' market will easily eat up about 14,000 calories of fossil
fuel energy. Just running your refrigerator for a week consumes
9,000 calories of energy. That assumes it's one of the latest
high-efficiency models; otherwise, you can double that figure.
Cooking and running dishwashers, freezers and second or third
refrigerators (more than 25 percent of American households have more
than one) all add major hits. Indeed, households make up for 22
percent of all the energy expenditures in the United States. 

Agriculture, on the other hand, accounts for just 2 percent of our
nation's energy usage; that energy is mainly devoted to running farm
machinery and manufacturing fertilizer. In return for that quite
modest energy investment, we have fed hundreds of millions of
people, liberated tens of millions from backbreaking manual labor
and spared hundreds of millions of acres for nature preserves,
forests and parks that otherwise would have come under the plow. 

Don't forget the astonishing fact that the total land area of
American farms remains almost unchanged from a century ago, at a
little under a billion acres, even though those farms now feed three
times as many Americans and export more than 10 times as much as
they did in 1910. 

The best way to make the most of these truly precious resources of
land, favorable climates and human labor is to grow lettuce,
oranges, wheat, peppers, bananas, whatever, in the places where they
grow best and with the most efficient technologies and then pay
the relatively tiny energy cost to get them to market, as we do with
every other commodity in the economy. Sometimes that means growing
vegetables in your backyard. Sometimes that means buying vegetables
grown in California or Costa Rica. 

Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is
not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself. The relative
pittance of our energy budget that we spend on modern farming is one
of the wisest energy investments we can make, when we honestly look
at what it returns to our land, our economy, our environment and our
well-being. 

Stephen Budiansky is the author of the blog liberalcurmudgeon.com.

Cheers

YK Jim


... I regret people's widespread ignorance of science & basic economics.

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