Local Food

I have often wondered why it is so hard to find locally grown food in the middle of Kansas. Why, for example, our local grocery has almost no produce, and what they have is often old. Why, for example, our local meat market sells only beef, and only frozen. Why, for example, the Lawrence Farmer's Market is only open a couple of days a week. I have had some conversations with people about all the reasons, but this excerpt from an NPR story really helps to solidify what's going on:

Ira Flatow: You show an interesting illustration of the state of Iowa, which we all know is a great agricultural state, but the people buying the food there — none of it's local except maybe the corn.

Mr. Halweil: Right. The irony of the whole sort of center of the country, the Corn Belt, is that most of that corn and soybeans goes elsewhere, and those very productive agricultural counties end up importing most of their food. The folks at Iowa State University at the Leopold Center looked at a typical meal consumed in Iowa — some beef, some string beans, some carrots, some potatoes, berries for a pie, wheat for bread — and what they found is that most of those ingredients came from between 1,000 and 2,000 miles away, from as far away as Chile and mostly from California, even though Iowa is perfectly capable of raising all of those ingredients for the vast majority of the year.

And most importantly, what they found is that long-distance meal consumed 17 times as much energy in transportation as that same meal raised within 50 miles of the university itself.

So not only is it gobbling up a tremendous amount of money, but it's actually taking dollars out of the state, dollars that could be going to Iowa farmers.

Ira Flatow: And why isn't it grown there then? If you can do it, why not do it?

Mr. Halweil: Well, it gets back to this sort of economic calculus that defines global trade, that defines trade anywhere at this point. And that is, if a store in Iowa can find a sack of potatoes grown slightly cheaper than it would cost them to grow it in Iowa, they get it from wherever they can. And because fuel is relatively inexpensive or a relatively small part of that cost, we're willing to ship those potatoes from as far away as China.

And we don't really attach a lot of value right now to the fact that those potatoes might have been grown locally, which might mean that they're fresher and tastier. It also means that we're not causing all this pollution and congestion as a result of the energy use. And also means that we're keeping money in our local economy.

Ira Flatow: Dr. Wilkins, you write about fossil fuel consuming a huge portion of our food costs.

Dr. Wilkins: Well, it certainly does. Our food system is very fossil fuel-dependent and very heavily uses of fossil fuels. It's estimated that about 20 percent of our fossil fuel use is used in the entire food system, from production to getting food on our table.

For every calorie that we consume, about 10 calories of fossil fuel has been used to produce that.

Ira Flatow: You wrote an article in the Times-Union, the local newspaper in Albany, New York, saying food policies fail to spur good health. And you talk about something that sort of flies below the radar screen of most Americans, most politicians. And that is the legislation that sets up the farm bill. What goes on in the farm bill affects just about all kinds of things that we eat. Talk about what your concerns are.

Dr. Wilkins: Well — and this gets back to our concentration of supporting very few commodities, as opposed to supporting diversity and variety, which we promote in the dietary guidelines. So our dietary guidelines are very sound in what they're promoting in terms of eating a variety of fruits and vegetables and eating whole grains and, you know, a variety of different kinds of foods.

Yet our production system that we support with policy is very narrow in what it supports. And the Economic Research Service of the USDA has estimated that we would need to put in six million acres more in crop production to supply the kinds of foods, if people shifted to the dietary guidelines, and produce far fewer acres of corn and far fewer acres, about 10 million fewer acres of soybeans.

So we're producing foods that are then converted to being available as commodities to the food industry that then finds multiple uses for them. We have, you know — walk into a supermarket today and see nearly 40,000 items in the supermarket. Gives a really great impression of a lot of choice. But when you start really looking at the ingredients in a lot of the packaged foods and the highly processed foods that we have in the supermarket, you'll start seeing the same ingredients all over the place.

And high fructose corn syrup, which didn't exist before 1970, is now pervasive throughout our food system as is a lot of added fat from soybeans.