Swallowing Eco-Hype

Among foodies, there are certain green truths that are self-evident: fruits and vegetables grown within 100 miles of your home means you're eating fresher, better-tasting foods that help to enhance the social and physical health of your entire community. And buying locally is good for the environment—or is it?

James E. McWilliams, author of a new book, Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly(Little, Brown), argues that being a locavore is not going to save the planet, much as its proponents seem to believe. In fact, he says, it may even be worse than eating food from miles and miles away: after all, a few crates of apples being trucked in from 50 miles away can expend more energy than a large one trucking in tons of apples from hundreds or thousands of miles away. The diktat to "eat locally" is wrongheaded if you're not considering the bigger environmental picture, he says. It's important to consider a food's life-cycle assessment, or the energy that gets put into its production and distribution—that means not just "food miles," but water and pesticide use, harvesting techniques, packaging, disposal, and many other factors.

 

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McWilliams also makes a strong case against eating only organic foods and for the potential benefits of genetically modified foods. He also explains why grass-fed beef can be bad for the environment. He spoke to NEWSWEEK by phone from his office at Texas State University-San Marcos, where he is a professor of history.

You take issue with the locavore movement and its emphasis on food miles, which you say is only a small part of the equation when it comes to having a sustainable food system. Is shopping at the farmers' market pointless, then?
No, it's not pointless. One thing I try to make clear is that I support a lot of the values and the ethics of the locavore movement. But I'm concerned about the movement becoming fundamentalist. Like any movement, it can become the victim of its own success. When I listen to locavores, I'm just not hearing enough about this looming global food crisis I think we're facing. I'm not in any way dismissing them; I'm just realistic about how far [reducing food miles] is going to get us in terms of addressing this bigger question about having to produce a lot more food with fewer resources over the next 50 years. We have to think about what happens to our food once it gets into our kitchen, and what we do to get that food, and most importantly, how that food was produced. Transportation/food miles count for only about 10 percent of overall energy that goes into producing our food.

According to your research, 14 percent of total food purchases are tossed in the trash, and about 27 percent of that is produce. That's a lot of food.
It's a ton of food. Especially for people who have kids. I have two of them, and it's horrifying how much food we waste. I'm sure if someone did a calculation of the energy that went into the food we're throwing out, I'm the problem. But it's not because my food came in on an airplane, it's because I'm throwing it out. But you could also ask questions about the kind of stoves we use. It's common now to just have these enormous gas stoves with these burners that could run a commercial kitchen. It's another way to remind ourselves that when we look at the carbon footprint of our diet, it's so much more immensely complicated than asking where our food came from.

You wrote that an all-organic food industry is simply not possible and can be in fact more dangerous than conventional food farming. Why is that?
Well, first of all, it's a hypothetical: [all-organic farming] is never going to happen. Two percent of the food that's produced in this country is produced organically. So when we get overly obsessed with organic food and say, "I'm only going to buy organic food," I think we're missing a real opportunity to figure out incentives for the other 98 percent to become more efficient without becoming organic. And there are so many ways this can be done that we're not talking about, like getting conventional farmers to judiciously use chemicals. Right now these products are so heavily subsidized that farmers really do not have an incentive to use them judiciously. They're incredibly cheap, so they dump these things indiscriminately.

You mean they're using more than they need to?
Oh, absolutely. It's especially true with fertilizers. There are some high-level fertilizers out there that are expensive but they are much more efficient. The environmental savings would be enormous if we subsidized the use of them. Most conventional farmers I talk to have a profoundly deep respect for the environment. They want to be good environmental stewards, but it's often too expensive for them to do so. And the fact is, there are fungal diseases, there are viruses, there are blights that organic methods cannot control. A lot of farmers want to go as organic as they possibly can, but they don't want to give up access to those weapons in case of an emergency.