Local is better

Don’t let the global food economy get you down

Tessa vanderhart, staff

Despite the media coverage of the recent “100-mile dieting” trend, eating locally and sustainability does not have to be about self-denial — simply put, it only makes good economic sense.

Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon’s book The 100-Mile Diet took the nation (or at least, B.C.) by canned vegetable last year, as they committed to eat only foods procured within — you guessed it! — 100 miles of their home of Vancouver.

As someone who agrees with the ideals of “organic,” “vegan” and “fair-trade” food — but is aware of the practical reality that those labels are meaningless — I can’t emphasize enough how “local” eating is the real deal.

The main draw is a reducing the pollution caused by transporting food a minimum of 1,500 miles (and an average of 2,500 to 4,000 miles) from tree to table.

To put that in perspective, the Manitoba Trucking Association opposes a 10 km/h speed limit increase on highways 1 and 75 because this 10 km/h increase will cause a “24-million-kilogram annual increase in [greenhouse gases] on Highway 1 alone.” Can you imagine how many trillions of kilograms of pollutants are created each day by the global food economy?

The simple logic of this campaign has been so effective that it’s spawned the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year: “locavore,” defined as “someone who eats a diet of food grown close to where they live.”

OK, in all honesty, Winnipeg is not the ideal place for 100-mile dieting — it’s more difficult than, say, the Lower Mainland of B.C. or a fertile jungle paradise — but a group of Manitobans who successfully completed the 100-mile diet challenge, eating only foods grown within 100 miles, for a whole year prove that it is possible. You can even eat out at one of several local restaurants that focus on local, farm-grown food.

And the best thing about local eating is that it’s ideal for implementing on an incremental basis: you start by hitting the Farmer’s Market during the summer, or getting local vegetables delivered; you step it up by planting a garden in your yard, an apple tree, or maybe an herb garden in your apartment; and, when you’re ready, you start preparing freezerfuls of vegetables and start a close, personal relationship with your local hemp seed farmer (they’re nutritious and delicious — try the hemp seed butter!).

Reasons for local eating simply abound, key among them economic sustainability. Lots of the food (like the electricity) produced in Manitoba is exported to the U.S., while we import cheaper goods from Asia. This leads to bizarre inconsistencies, such as reported in Larry Zuckerman’s The Potato, where Idaho — famous for its potatoes! — has to import from neighbouring Wiscounsin because Idahoans cannot afford the local stock.

The farming industry has been particularly hard-hit over the past decades of food globalization — which started in earnest in the 1950s when technology improved and fuel prices dropped. According to the U.S. Census, American farmers in 1910 made 40 cents for every dollar of food Americans consumed. In 1997, they made seven cents.

And it’s not only farmers — in 2004, 10.2 per cent of Canadians experienced food insecurity — that is, they didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. One in 10 Canadians!

Worse still, when Americans stop accepting Canadian food — namely, beef, which “could have been tainted” with BSE — instead of using it to feed hungry people, we generally just wasted it, slaughtering millions of cattle that could have been eaten had a simple test been done on the meat.

And yet we keep blithely exporting food to the U.S. in the name of free trade, turning it into ethanol, animal feed, etc..

And thus we come to the real, real reason that trying to eat local is so important: because it levels the playing field equal. Shipping food across the world costs more than you pay at the grocery store; the economist’s term is that this globe-trotting produce produces “externalities” — costs (or benefits) of producing an item that affect people other than the producers. And, to be clear, The Economist magazine calls these externalities, or consumer cost screw-ups, a “market failure.”

As 100-Mile Diet authors Smith and MacKinnon ask in a column on the Tyee.com, “How does produce that has travelled thousands of kilometers end up retailing for no more than the local goods — and sometimes for even less?”

Well, it’s because of farm subsidies in other countries, which are prohibited by free-trade agreements but flourish because some market protection is needed in highly volatile food markets. It’s also because of subsidies to oil conglomerates, which make chemical fertilizers cheaper and also stabilize the market price of gasoline at an artificially low, consumer-friendly price. In fact, a 2001 study by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture states that transportation costs are so artificially low that consumer goods cost only 10 per cent of what they would left entirely up to market forces (that also includes government-funded roads and lax environmental policies that favour chemical fertilizers). Ten per cent!

Thus, the global food economy has social costs — taking food off of the tables of third-world farmers and Canadians alike — and environmental costs — like pollution and biodiversity and drying up entire watersheds; but most importantly, it is standing in the way of the market. And that is simply not acceptable.

Eat local. It’s what Milton Friedman would do!