Yesterday I quoted Stephen J. Dubner’s criticism of Michael Pollan and the local food movement and concluded, generously, that “Dubner’s contribution to the [food] debate is to keep it real.”
Then I listened to his appearance (mp3) on The Takeaway. Dubner apparently hardly even bothered to prepare for the show. Said he, straight off, when the interviewer assumed he had “actually been investigating the impulse…to grow it yourself and you’ve come up with some hard cold reality-based conclusions:”
Well, investigating is a generous word for what I’ve been doing but I’ve poked around a little bit, right, so it’s a complex problem which is part of the issue here. The minute we talk about food miles… the math gets pretty complicated.
Yes, it does, Stephen. That’s what we need you for!
Dubner goes on to tell us that “the grocery store is the end product of a couple centuries of food production research.” Ipso factso the food coming from it “ends up having probably a smaller footprint than a hundred people growing locally.” In case you missed it, the emphasis on that probably is mine! It would have been helpful had Stephen done some research prior to coming on the show, and maybe cited some of it!
He goes on to cite his personal farm experience, as if to suggest that childhood experience is evidence of anything other than the single instance it represents. (Like the ice cream anecdote I quoted yesterday that was so ably dismissed by my commenter, thank you GreenDreams!) Anecdotes without standards and testing do not add up to evidence, Stephen.
The last of the whoppers is his notion of “the average grocery store” providing variety and freedom of choice. He says, “If I don’t want to buy the agribusiness, I don’t have to.” In fact, it’s very important to understand that we can only choose from the choices presented. The entire discussion on that program was a missed opportunity for the worthwhile discussion this nation wants to have. We’re hungry for it, that’s why they booked you Stephen!
Even remembering that Dubner is the journalist half of the Freakonomics duo (Steven Levitt, the wunderkind economist, is the other) he owed it to his audience to have done better. A good place to start might have been the February 25, New Yorker, Big Foot: In measuring carbon emissions, it’s easy to confuse morality and science:
Many factors influence the carbon footprint of a product: water use, cultivation and harvesting methods, quantity and type of fertilizer, even the type of fuel used to make the package. Sea-freight emissions are less than a sixtieth of those associated with airplanes, and you don’t have to build highways to berth a ship. Last year, a study of the carbon cost of the global wine trade found that it is actually more “green” for New Yorkers to drink wine from Bordeaux, which is shipped by sea, than wine from California, sent by truck. That is largely because shipping wine is mostly shipping glass. The study found that “the efficiencies of shipping drive a ‘green line’ all the way to Columbus, Ohio, the point where a wine from Bordeaux and Napa has the same carbon intensity.”
The environmental burden imposed by importing apples from New Zealand to Northern Europe or New York can be lower than if the apples were raised fifty miles away. “In New Zealand, they have more sunshine than in the U.K., which helps productivity,” Williams explained. That means the yield of New Zealand apples far exceeds the yield of those grown in northern climates, so the energy required for farmers to grow the crop is correspondingly lower. It also helps that the electricity in New Zealand is mostly generated by renewable sources, none of which emit large amounts of CO2.
Researchers at Lincoln University, in Christchurch, found that lamb raised in New Zealand and shipped eleven thousand miles by boat to England produced six hundred and eighty-eight kilograms of carbon-dioxide emissions per ton, about a fourth the amount produced by British lamb. In part, that is because pastures in New Zealand need far less fertilizer than most grazing land in Britain (or in many parts of the United States). Similarly, importing beans from Uganda or Kenya—where the farms are small, tractor use is limited, and the fertilizer is almost always manure—tends to be more efficient than growing beans in Europe, with its reliance on energy-dependent irrigation systems.
I get that it’s tricky problem. But the answer’s not glib bromides about the history of supermarkets!