Our food shouldn’t have to travel long distance

"The most important ingredient in our upcoming Thanksgiving dinner will be oil. That needs to change."

By Don Gordon

Thanksgiving is less than two weeks away and cooks soon will be planning a feast. For most Americans, the food they consume on this holiday will have traveled a great distance. The Worldwatch Institute reports food now travels between 1,500 and 2,500 miles from the farm to the table. Thanks to decades of cheap food (largely because of cheap oil, and of course refrigeration), Americans have paid little attention to where or how food is produced.

For example, at the supermarket we now have a wide selection of apple varieties. As long as the price is comparable we don’t seem to care if the fruit came from New Zealand, Washington State or Mankato.

Eighty percent of the cranberries we consume are from Wisconsin or Massachusetts. It would seem environmentally prudent to purchase this fruit from our neighboring state, but do we really care if this fruit traveled 100 or 1,400 miles? Apparently not. In Florida supermarkets, it is commonplace to see California orange juice.

Not long ago I was in Hawaii touring botanical gardens, and I was shocked to learn that state produces only 15 percent of the food it consumes. Out of all 50 states, Hawaii has nearly perfect conditions for growing a wide variety of fruit and vegetables. Warm temperatures, abundant sunshine, nutrient rich volcanic soils and abundant water supplies provide ideal growing conditions.

When I asked why they didn’t grow more of their own food, I was told labor costs were too high. It was cheaper to buy from the continental United States and from other countries. In the markets I saw crate after crate of vegetables and fruit from China. Even Hawaii’s signature fruit, the pineapple, is a disappearing commodity. Dole, the largest producer, is moving pineapple production to countries that have lower labor costs. Thanks to subsidies, more and more Hawaiian land is being planted to sugarcane for ethanol production.

In 2005, the environmental writer, Jessica Prenice, coined the word "locavore" to describe individuals who consume locally grown food. In his book “Home Grown: The Case for Local Food Production,” Brian Halwell outlines why it pays to be a locavore.

The attributes of locally grown food include freshness, taste and support of community and local growers. Purity is another important factor. You usually have a pretty good idea how the local grower produced their crops. The same cannot be said for imports from places like China.

Writing last year in the New York Times, James McWilliams asked if reducing food miles is good for the environment and should we count food miles the way a dieter counts calories? On the surface more food miles should mean more oil consumed, more carbon dioxide produced, and thus more global warming.

But it is not quite that simple. To calculate the true environmental cost, factors such as water use, type of nutrients used, planting and harvesting techniques, packaging and disposal methods, types of transportation as well as all other inputs and outputs must be calculated.

In a recent article in the Financial Post, Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu reported that the largest greenhouse gas impact of food transportation can be attributed to individual families making many small volume shopping trips by car to trans­port food from retail stores to their homes. They claim moving food in energy efficient container ships, airplanes or tractor trailers requires much less energy per apple, flower, etc., even if the distance is much greater.

These assumptions, even if sometimes correct, do not negate the overall benefits of buying locally, but they do make the case that food miles alone may distort the environmental impacts of food production.

Michael Pollan, my favorite botanical writer, thinks we need to completely revamp the American food policy. In a recent New York Times article he encourages our new president to focus on the quality and diversity (not merely the quantity) of the food we produce. Pollan believes “the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close.” And because agriculture uses 19 percent of our energy budget (second only to cars), it cannot be ignored in the plan to curb global warm­ing.

Pollan believes our current food policy, which is based on maximizing production at all costs, is in shambles. Our policy of subsidizing commodity crops like corn, wheat and soybeans needs revamping.

We also need to consider the impact that our food policy has on the rest of the world. This past year more than 30 nations have had food riots, which can be traced to our government’s food policies. Using our food supply to produce fuel for cars needs a second look.

Pollan isn’t advocating everyone become a locavore, but he is encouraging the promotion of regional food economies both in America and around the world. This would mean substituting polyculture for monoculture and “resolarizing the American farm.” He believes “we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-Century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine.” The most important ingredient in our upcoming Thanksgiving dinner will be oil. That needs to change.

Don Gordon is professor emeritus of botany at Minnesota State University, Mankato. For more of his articles, go here.