Local foods good for the environment?

A couple months ago the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment published a paper by Andrew Zumkehr and Elliott Campbell.  The paper was widely reported in the press.  For example the Washington Post the headline: As much as 90 percent of Americans could eat food grown within 100 miles of their home.  Another outlet: Most Americans could eat locally.  

I promptly wrote a blog post asking: even if Americans could eat locally, should they?  Shortly thereafter, I exchanged several emails with Pierre Desrochers, the author of the excellent book The Locavore's Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet.  We decided a more formal reply was warranted.  

I'm pleased to report that a couple days ago Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment published a letter by Pierre and me.

We write:

“In a recent paper, Andrew Zumkehr and Elliott Campbell (2015; Front Ecol Environ 13[5]: 244–248) present a simulation study that assesses the technological feasibility of providing enough local calories to feed every American. In so doing, they suggest turning back the clock on one of Homo sapiens sapiens’ greatest evolutionary achievements: the ability to trade physical goods over increasingly longer distances, producing an attending ever-widening division of labor (Horan et al. 2005). The main benefit of this process is that one hundred people who specialize and engage in trade end up producing and consuming far more than one hundred times what any one individual would achieve on his or her own. By spontaneously relocating food production to regions with higher biotic potential for specific types of crops and livestock in order to optimize the overall use of resources, trade and the division of labor have delivered more output at lower costs.

Zumkehr and Campbell largely sidestep these benefits. They cite a few studies suggesting that (re)localized food systems would deliver environmental, economic, food security, and social benefits, but neglect to mention critiques of those claims”

We offer these specific critiques of their model:

“We also take issue with the authors’ use of yield data from each county to infer the agricultural potential of each location. This approach suffers from selectivity bias; the effect of increasing local food production onto more marginal local lands will likely deliver less-productive results than current average yields. In a competitive market economy, observed crop yields near urban locations are likely to represent an upper bound for the overall level of productivity in the area because only lands productive enough to outcompete other uses are currently devoted to agricultural production. The authors are also silent on the environmental consequences of removing wildlife from current idle lands to make room for domesticated plants and animals.

Moreover, the authors exclude cost considerations and conclude that the “current foodshed potential of most US cities is not limited by current agronomic capacity or demographics to any great extent”, but rather by “social and economic” considerations. However, an economic barrier is just as real and restrictive as an agronomic one. Resource and budget constraints simply will not allow all wants and desires to be realized. It is all very well telling people with limited means to eat local cake, but they should also be told of its price tag.”

Animal-less Burgers

In my forthcoming book, Unnaturally Delicious, I've got a chapter on the promises and challenges of efforts underway to produce lab-grown meat.  My chapter focuses mainly on the efforts of a Dutch scientists, Mark Post.

This article in Tech Crunch discusses related efforts by a different group of scientists and investors.  

“Impossible Foods, a four-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based company at work on a new generation of meats and cheeses made entirely from plants, has raised $108 million in new funding from a powerful group of backers.

Investors in the round, which was led by UBS, include Viking Global Investors and earlier backers Khosla Ventures; Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates; and Horizons Ventures, which invests on behalf of Hong Kong business magnate Li Ka-shing.”

Those are some heavy hitters.  It will be interesting to see where it all goes.

Impact of Process Labeling

The Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST) just released a new paper on the impact of process food labeling.  The paper was written by a number of top-notch ag economists including Kent Messer, Marco Costanigro,  and Harry Kaiser.  It's a nice summary of the issues involved in the labeling of food processes (like organic or non-GMO or rbST free) as opposed to labeling food outcomes (like calories).

The summarize five points after reviewing the literature:

“1. Consumers want to have a sense of control over the foods their families eat.
2. Food markets are characterized by asymmetric information. Producers know more about the quality of the products than consumers. Many important quality traits are unknown until after consumption, or they are never revealed.
3. Consumers are not well informed about the various technologies used in the agricultural and food sector of the United States; however, they have greatly benefited from the tremendous technological progress that has occurred over the past century.
4. Consumers use process labels as cues to infer quality traits that are important to them, such as taste, food safety, and the environmental and societal impacts.
5. There is strong evidence that consumers consider process labels, frequently adjust their behavior in response to them, and, when these labels imply a negative aspect of a food, can shun that product. ”

They also present a number of challenges presented by these sorts of labels, such as

“Process labels can be used by marketers to stigmatize rival conventionally produced products, even when there is no scientific evidence that food produced in this manner
causes harm.”

The authors end with some policy recommendations.  Here's the first one:

“Mandatory labeling should only occur in situations in which the product has been scientifically demonstrated to harm human health.”

Agri-Pulse Interview on GMOs

I was recently interviewed by Agri-Pulse about GMOs, GMO labeling, and technology adoption.  You can hear the whole thing here.

Ecomodernism

I've never really considered myself much of an environmentalist.  Its not that I don't care about clean air, endangered species, or rain forests, only that so much of what I've read from self-described environmentalists tends to be anti-technology, anti-growth, and anti-free markets - basically "anti" many of the things I happen to believe are quite good for the planet overall.

Of course, those aren't the views of every environmentalist but they do seem to represent the modal view I read in the media.  For many years, I've been aware of organizations like PERC which advocates for free market environmentalism.  But, it was only this summer that I became aware of a related movement after a call from Michael Shellenberger who is the President of the Breakthrough Institute.  

He and others are heading up a movement they call Ecomodernism.  I'm sympathetic to many of the views espoused in the Ecomodernist Manifesto that was put out in April.  They write, for example:

“Intensifying many human activities — particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry, and settlement — so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world is the key to decoupling human development from environmental impacts. These socioeconomic and technological processes are central to economic modernization and environmental protection. Together they allow people to mitigate climate change, to spare nature, and to alleviate global poverty.”

and

“We offer this statement in the belief that both human prosperity and an ecologically vibrant planet are not only possible but also inseparable. By committing to the real processes, already underway, that have begun to decouple human well-being from environmental destruction, we believe that such a future might be achieved. As such, we embrace an optimistic view toward human capacities and the future.”

I'm not yet ready so say I'm an ecomodernist, but this certainly seems a much more attractive kind of environmentalism than I've encountered in the past.