
Local and organic is a romantic myth - nkurz
http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/does-sustainability-come-from-a-supermarket?
======
ndespres
As a farmer I'm biased, but there's a lot to be said for eating fresh, in-
season foods produced by people in your community. The human and environmental
costs of making sure tomatoes can reach you from 1000 miles away is sickening.
We run a 50-member CSA. Produce is picked fresh weekly or bi-weekly from the
garden and available for pickup by 50 local families.

Are our yields as high as what we might get if robotic pickers and chemical
fertilizers were used? No, but nobody is dying or being abused or getting
cancer to make sure that a disgusting, mealy, colorless tomato can be on your
cheeseburger.

~~~
greggyb
The environmental cost tends to be lower with the 1000 mile food.
Transportation efficiencies of freight trains and tractor trailers dwarf those
of the pickups and small container trucks you see with local produce. The
overall emissions per pound of produce transported end up lower with the
distant food.

~~~
tehchromic
uh, what's the cost in fuel emissions when I get a veg from my front yard
grown in mulch generated from my own tree?

~~~
bpodgursky
Depends. Did you even once drive to the nursery or hardware store to pick up
seeds, pots or fertilizer to grow it?

If so, you have completely negated all energy savings.

~~~
tehchromic
not quite, since that one trip produced many pounds of fresh healthy food over
many weeks, whereas a comparable amount of fresh produce from the grocery
store takes many trips.

That said, it's a culture of food production that's really where the
efficiency lies. That's people saving and trading seeds, helping each other
farm and harvest, and bottling and canning for winter.

That's not only tremendously efficient if it's done locally, it's also fun.

------
jmnicolas
> But surely, you’ll object, tomatoes grown in small-scale gardens taste
> better. Not so! Double-blind tasting panels have been unable to pick out the
> greenhouse tomatoes as lacking in flavour, or tomatoes grown without
> fertiliser as more tasteful.

Maybe ... but there's a big difference between a store bought tomato that was
stored in a fridge for months and a fresh tomato that comes out of the garden
of my parents.

One is like eating cardboard with a strange texture, the other is actually an
enjoyable experience even for someone that is not big on vegetables (OK fruits
if you musts insist).

~~~
squidfood
Yup, this is one case where the "double-blind" takes out the actual variance
in the experiment. I don't care about the carefully-controlled studies. The
practical effect of including all aspects of the supply chain is that my
personal supermarket's tomatoes are bland and mealy; the ones from my local
farmers' market aren't.

~~~
mistermann
Heirloom tomatoes from a farmers market cost 3x as much as grocery store
tomatoes, and they're worth every penny.

------
jonah
In about 15 minutes, I'm going to get up from my desk, go outside and walk two
blocks. There I'll arrive at one of the 8 weekly farmers markets in my area.
It takes up two city blocks of the main street, every Tuesday evening year-
round.

There, I'll visit with the farmers I know by name and buy produce that was
grown on farms a half-an-hour away.

The tomatoes I'll pick up will be one of may varieties available and so ripe
that I'll need to eat them in the next couple days. That's OK because I can
get more at the Saturday market. They'll also taste amazing and better than
what I can get at the grocery store at any time. They'll also be very close to
the same price.

I'm extremely thankful that I live in a place where this is possible and fully
intend to continue doing so for multiple reasons - eating tastier food,
supporting the local economy, experiencing exotic varieties, and participating
in my local community.

------
readams
Many enjoy locally produced food and desire the freshness or access to
heirloom varieties.

But it's important to recognize that this isn't an environmentally friendly or
especially sustainable pattern of consumption. Indeed these modes of
production are less efficient and likely to be more damaging to the
environment.

Local and/or organic is a luxury consumption option. Much like buying a choice
cut of meat or premium food brands. Just don't make the mistake of thinking
that it's also more "green."

~~~
tehchromic
Back up your claims!

You might also say: access to clean air and unpolluted drinking water is a
luxury which is not particularly environmentally friendly or sustainable. Keep
in mind when you are breathing and drinking clean air and water, that it's
gonna be that way forever, and you're gonna be drinking mud and breathing soot
in the long term because you're living in a "green" fantasy.

That'd be kinda setting the status quo for everyone based on your own low
standards I think.

~~~
readams
This makes no sense. The whole point is to find a model for feeding 7 billion
people that preserves the environment. Local and organic do _more_ damage to
the environment than producing the same equivalent amount of food
industrially. They use more land and more energy.

A solution for the environment cannot involve starving the world, or needing
to allocate even more huge swaths of it for agriculture.

~~~
tehchromic
"do more damage"

sorry, that's the claim that is not substantiated by evidence and it isn't
close to being accurate. Conventional farming is a toxic mess, and it's
heavily subsidized by unsustainable resources and practices at every level. It
may be the case that the cost of doing farming right is high (and that is not
necessarily meeting the "organic" standards which are themselves heavily
biased by conventional interests, but by farming using truly organic methods)
but that's because it tends to include costs to the planet, or not include
cost savings that are causing extinction level changes to the planetary
chemistry. There are people who will tell you that sustaining our population
is not possible and that we are headed for an extinction event, however other
people say that it is possible to live within our means, if we start factoring
in the real cost of things like conventional farming, and therefore change our
practice.

And technology is definitely a factor in that transition, so if you buy the
phony trolling argument going on here that greenhouses, and automation is
incompatible with sustainable, organic, local farming practice, then you are
being sold a bill o' goods!

------
alisson
> But urban land is in short supply, expensive, often polluted, and unsuitable
> for horticulture.

We should stop focusing on the plants and focus more on the soil. Better soil
= better water retention = less work with irrigation = healthy plants =
healthy planet.

> The belief that only small-scale, non-mechanised agriculture without the use
> of chemicals respects biodiversity, and that tradition is key to the future,
> is illusory. In reality, small-scale unfertilised farming of annual crops or
> unregulated grazing in the tropics are major causes of destruction of soils
> and forests.

The only problem here is the "annual crops or unregulated grazing" because on
a diverse agroforestry the trend is the opposite, the soil gets better and
better as years goes on. More organic matter falling on the soil = better
soil, as long as you don't remove the organic matter you're good to go! The
main problem lives here, a lot of people clean the grass and burn it, the soil
should never be uncovered, you can cut the grass no problem but leave it there
to compost and improve your soil, just like happens in a forest.

> Chemical use is still, for the most part, equated with environmental
> destruction. This is a false image, one that leads people to turn away from
> science and technology. We cannot go back to the ill-designed agricultural
> systems of past centuries with their famines and harvest failures.

Sure, this so called "science and technology" is what made the land "often
polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture" in the first place.

Grow food forests, build forest soil! The forest never needs any chemical
added by humans, it doesn't have pest problems, why? It's diverse.
Diversification guarantees your surviving, when you have only one source of
food (or money, or anything) and it dries out you starve, but if you have
multiple sources you can not only survive but have more colorful plate too.

Sure it's more laboring to do forest, but we can change our machines to work
with forests instead of mono-cultures, that's the way to go, the more mature a
forest gets the less human intervention it needs. Here in Brasil I'm seeing a
few people starting to develop machines to work with agroforestry, that's the
future of food IMHO: forests!

Well, maybe I'm biased, since I found out permaculture and agroforestry I'm in
love, couldn't be happier :)

~~~
readams
What is the yield from your agriforest? Will your forests feed 7 billion
people?

Of course not. It's perfectly fine to desire luxury goods like local or
heirloom varieties when you buy your food. But you are trying to propose a
model for feeding the world, and using this approach the world would starve.

~~~
alisson
I'm just a beginner here, my agroforest yields nothing, I started just a few
months ago. Anyway, from what I hear from people more experienced than me is
quite the opposite, it yields much more, sure you would get less tomatos per
hectare but you would get a lot of other products too. I'm very curious where
can I find evidences agroforests couldn't feed the world? Or evidences it
yields less then current farming methods?

Edit: a good view on the agroforests they're doing here
[https://vimeo.com/136423275](https://vimeo.com/136423275) it is subtitled,
this one is a good example of how a agroforest can recover destructed lands.

------
OJFord
I didn't make it beyond a few paragraphs, and I don't really have even 'semi-
strong' views either way - but this reads like the author has never set foot
in the country, nevermind lived there.

The "there's still potential for spoils in transport" argument is laughable,
insignificant, and I imagine less than that occurring in transport to a mass-
packing facility!

------
Alex3917
I'm all for technology, but this is just poorly written pro-agribusiness
propaganda. It doesn't even address any of the most common criticisms of big
agriculture, and instead is just attacking farmers markets for whatever
reason.

------
apsec112
A lot of people don't realize that shipping is incredibly cheap now, in both
money and energy. It takes less fuel to ship a car from London to New York by
container ship than it does to drive that car fifty miles.

------
msandford
OK, then BY ALL MEANS please create a supply chain to supply me with delicious
heirloom tomatoes that stretches a few thousand miles. I suspect if it were
possible places like Whole Foods and the like would already be doing it and
selling those tomatoes at $5-$10/lb year round.

But since I can only get them in season, and rarely then, I suspect that there
is something to the "local, organic" myth after all.

~~~
johansch
You never realized it's all about the price point being combined with a story?
Someone figured out you can make people pay quite a bit more for higher
quality tomatoes if you can claim with some credibility that they are grown
locally.

How about the good quality tomatoes grown 1000 miles away, that could be
economically shipped to you in a way that is less destructive to the
environment than the first option, still taste as good and be cheaper? Not an
option, because they don't conform to your arbitrarily chosen standard of
being "local".

You are no better than the luddites.

There is nothing about mass production that lowers the quality. What lowers
quality is the price point and the demand for the cheapest possible product.
Shift it to some better balance between quality and price, and mass production
would kill your cute little hobbyist farms in every single benchmark,
including sustainability.

At the moment the "ecological"/"locally grown" meme is blocking this
development.

~~~
jonah
It's just not physically possible to ship a tomato that's been fully vine
ripened for a thousand miles. Once they're fully ripe, they're too fragile to
ship an appreciable distance. So, the big producers pick them hard and unripe
and ship them. Yes, they'll continue to ripen off the vine, but once they've
been cut off from their source of nutrients and water they're not going to get
any more. It's the trade off necessary to have produce outside of the local
season. (Greenhouses in upstate with grow lights would be a better alternative
way to get tomatoes in New York City in January though.)

~~~
johansch
> Once they're fully ripe, they're too fragile to ship an appreciable
> distance.

That is a mechanical problem. It can and probably has been solved, except it's
likely a bit more expensive than just chucking them into a box. Again, the
price point.

~~~
jonah
Yep, we can air-freight tomatoes on individual foam pillows. Then we'll talk
about transportation and packaging costs. ;)

~~~
johansch
Sigh. Yeah, that's obviously the only other alternative, right? (How do you
mark up sarcasm here?)

------
sxcurry
Now I feel really badly about buying the local organic produce at one of the
many farmers markets near me. Even though the produce is fresh, delicious, and
my $$$ stay in my local community, I now realize that I should have been
paying for the tomato transported 1000 miles with a smart chip in the carton.
Thanks for the wake up call!

------
Spooky23
I live in upstate ny and get all of my seasonal vegetables from farms about
45m away.

Sunday we got rutabagas about 5x the size of the supermarket versions for 1/2
the price. Bushel of broccoli for $10. Bushel of spaghetti squash for $20.
(75% savings vs retail)

So cheaper and it almost always of higher quality.

------
mattupstate
If this type of subject is interesting to you then you should some of Rachel
Laudan's work. She's a food historian but is very in tune with this topic.
Here's a brief interview with her:
[http://www.washingtonian.com/blogs/bestbites/todd-kliman-
oth...](http://www.washingtonian.com/blogs/bestbites/todd-kliman-
otherwise/rachel-lauden-how-michael-pollan-alice-waters-got-everything-
wrong.php)

------
tabrischen
I don't understand why this is not scalable. Even in the bay area, where there
is high population density and the price of living is one of the highest in
the world, there are tons of farmer's markets everywhere.

Technology which improves transportation aid local food production even more.

------
johansch
Well duh. (Although I have witnessed many otherwise smart people fall for this
fallacy.)

~~~
tehchromic
Probably the best evidence I have to support this "fallacy" is the couple
hundred pounds of honey I harvest locally every year. So according to this
article I should drop my beekeeping and just buy honey from Chinese suppliers
who are operating at scale and using smarter ... technology? I dunno, but in
the future I'd like my honey like my tomatoes: to continue to come from my
neighborhood whenever possible.

~~~
johansch
I don't understand why the opposite to "local" has to be "halfway around the
world". Why not do it in a scalable but sensible way? You know, like being
able to address a market of millions instead of thousands, but perhaps not
necessarily billions.

You are of course welcome to pay extra for some sort of weird pleasure of
having things made very close to where you live, but I think the taxation
systems should punish you for the extra strain that makes you put onto the
environment.

~~~
tehchromic
well i agree with you, and I wouldn't knock food transport and scale provided
it is done in a sustainable and non toxic way.

but i definitely take issue with the "weird pleasure" comment, as there is
nothing weird about the pleasure of farming in the city and growing your own
food. It's about one of the most engaging cultural practices in existence, and
it's as old as people. But it takes learning and practice, and awareness of
that value, which is clearly missing in modern culture which views farming as
some sort of weird thing. A weird peasure indeed!

------
alisson
Agroforest on a intense farmed land:
[https://vimeo.com/136423275](https://vimeo.com/136423275) How is it not
sustainable? How can it not feed the world?

------
tehchromic
> But urban land is in short supply, expensive, often polluted, and unsuitable
> for horticulture.

Nonsense. This is an argument for expanding access and cleaning up after
ourselves - land that is too polluted to grow in is too polluted to live on.

> So does the industrial washing of packed and cut vegetables, which also
> saves water, compared with household‑level processing.

Also bullshit. People spend more water cleaning vegetables that have already
been cleaned from industrial sources than from their yard. Growing vegetables
close to home is a resource saver across the board, especially if it were
smartly integrated with urban composting projects.

>While ‘handpicked’ sounds attractive to the urban consumer or occasional
gardener, this type of manual labour is backbreaking if done all day long.

It is attractive to the urban consumer because if you are picking for yourself
and family, the work isn't backbreaking and all day long. I fully believe in
automated, roboticized food production as a replacement of slave labor,
however it seems fairly sensible to me that, as labor becomes less of an
imperative of class, that the quality of a person's labor will become more
refined holistic and less machine-like, ie: farming and gardening for exercise
instead of going to the gym.

> To top it all, the yield from organic farming is low.

Bullshit!! I don't have numbers handy, but I've been on farm tours, (granted
organic is a misleading label these days) and the net yield from farms that
depend on renewable, organic resources is higher than industrialized factory
farmed produce, and the quality is higher. Only in the narrow calculus of unit
per price is the yield higher, but we already know the dirty secret there:
factory farmed, mass produced food is subsidized by oil and unsustainable
resources, where the true cost is buried in diminishing returns over
generational time spans.

> ketchup haha! the great ketchup argument. Now we know this was ghost written
> by Ronald Raygunz ghost!

> Double-blind tasting panels have been unable to pick out the greenhouse
> tomatoes as lacking in flavour, or tomatoes grown without fertiliser as more
> tasteful.

Manure. Who does the testing? I can't think of an easier study to game. Plus
"tomatoes grown without fertiliser" is a tell: not "fertilizer" as organic
compost made from cow manure is "fertilizer", but inorganic fertilizer made
from petroleum? - yeah, give me the manure tomatoes please.

And here's the last straw in this troll article:

>In complete contrast to the mantra of organic farming, modern greenhouses are
now in the vanguard of sustainability.

Because organic farmers have used greenhouses for decades and beyond, and
there's nothing incompatible with the organic, sustainable, small-scale, local
movements and the greenhouse. So this article can't maintain a consistent
argument with respect to its own premise. No one is arguing that
sustainability in farming shouldn't utilize the best tech possible, but
attacking the best progressive pillars of the movement which are small scale,
individual efforts on shoddy grounds to promote the benevolent promise of mass
scale industrial agriculture - it's not good work.

I will say that to the extend that these kinds of articles are meant to raise
hackles and cause discussion among hipster urban farm types, then well done!

~~~
johansch
>> To top it all, the yield from organic farming is low.

> Bullshit!! I don't have numbers handy, but I've been on farm tours, (granted
> organic is a misleading label these days) and the net yield from farms that
> depend on renewable, organic resources is higher than industrialized factory
> farmed produce, and the quality is higher. Only in the narrow calculus of
> unit per price is the yield higher, but we already know the dirty secret
> there: factory farmed, mass produced food is subsidized by oil and
> unsustainable resources, where the true cost is buried in diminishing
> returns over generational time spans.

Note that you have to include the environmental footprint of the inefficient
humans that manage "organic" farms and compare that to more automated
variants.

~~~
tehchromic
yeah but that's the problem exactly with the article, which is that there is
no incompatibility with automated, greenhoused, hi-tech, and sustainable,
local, organic farming. They are compatible. Given that, local and organic
(not the label, but the true meaning, which is things grown in living and
decaying matter, not awash in chemicals and subsidized by non-renewable,
fossil fuel based supplements) The argument is that conventional mass
production farming is superior to local, hands-on, organic farming. I don't
think this is true, but I know a lot of pretty deeply invested corporations
that would like it to be true.

