Dec
9
If It’s Fresh and Local, Is It Always Greener?
Tags: Sustainability
Filed Under Articles
The New York Times
Andrew Martin
And just when I thought I had it figured out…
Read the article here.
Excerpt:
The local food, or locavore, movement has so much momentum that some of the food glitterati have declared that such food is better than organic.
But now comes a team of researchers from the University of California, Davis, who have started asking provocative questions about the carbon footprint of food. Those questions threaten to undermine some of the feel-good locavore story line, not to mention my weekend forays for produce. (A carbon footprint is a measure of the impact of human activities on the environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced.)
While the research is not yet complete, Tom Tomich, director of the University of California Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, said the fact that something is local doesn’t necessarily mean that it is better, environmentally speaking.
The distance that food travels from farm to plate is certainly important, he says, but so is how food is packaged, how it is grown, how it is processed and how it is transported to market.
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