The concept of "food miles," or how far food has traveled before we buy it, has become the latest hot button for environmental food activists. And just when you thought the notion of food miles would be another compelling reason to buy local comes a study that suggests that computing real food miles leads to sometimes counterintuitive conclusions, namely that some locally sourced and grown food can leave a far heavier carbon footprint than foods shipped thousands of miles. In a thoughtful piece on the New York Times op-ed page this morning, James McWilliams draws this remarkably level-headed conclusion: We must also be prepared to accept that buying local is not necessarily beneficial for the environment. As much as this...
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In my heart I would like to be a locavore purist, eating food grown or raised within a 500-mile radius of my house. When I read about Broadway East, a restaurant opening this fall in New York City that is going to serve three locavore squares a day, I applauded. I believe in local food, slow food, and every other kind of "food" movement that supports local farmers and sustainable agriculture. I pledge allegiance to Alice Waters every day. But what's a localist to do when the cherries taste better from Washington, 3,000 miles away from where this local yokel calls home?...
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Ed Crowell, Kitty Crider, Dale Rice, and Renee Studebaker of the Austin American-Statesman all spent an entire week in April as locavores, trying their best to eat only food that was grown and manufactured within a 200-mile radius of Austin. Crider points out that "while Texas is a large agricultural state, Travis County is not," and so while there were many things they chose to do without (bananas, tortilla chips), there are also foods they expanded their definitions to include (oranges from the Rio Grande Valley, seafood from the Gulf), and others they rationalized into keeping like coffee, tea and spices saying, "after all, this country's pioneers traded afar for those things, too." All four writers kept detailed diaries...
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