Another Perspective on Food Miles

We look for meaningful labels on food to make our decisions easier, hoping the label will have done some of the "know where your food comes from" work for us. Consumers have expressed so much disappointment and frustration that labels and standards don't do more -- that organic tells us how food was produced, but not how far it traveled or what price was paid to the farmer, or how much pasture a dairy cow had access to or whether it will make us fat. But the truth is, and I've said it before, no label can absolve us from exploring our own values and making informed decisions about our purchases. There are scorecard models that attempt to give a comprehensive picture of a product and the company that makes it, but the complexity and ever-changing nature of what we know makes even that a challenging exercise, if not downright futile.

The local label has been the darling of the food world this year, for a lot of good reasons and sometimes, I think, just because it's something new and has a sense of being revolutionary in the way that organic once did. But local -- especially local, undefined -- is no more a perfect label or food scheme than others. In today's San Francisco Chronicle, William G. Moseley, a geography professor in Minnesota, explores the ramifications of the U.S./U.K. local movement in the world he researches -- Africa. In "Farmers in developing world hurt by 'eat local' philosophy in U.S.," Moseley posits that removing or limiting the niche organic market that has offered alternatives to small farmers there will force them back to conventional chemical farming, since they are dependent on an export market and already do supply local markets.

I think if you were to ask those who are rallying against imported organic foods, they'd say it's the stuff from massive corporate-organic farms in China that they're concerned about, not small poor farmers in Africa. But that distinction isn't visible in the "local is automatically better" model. So is it the size of the farm, more than where it is, that matters? That brings us back to the question of scale and how-big-is-too-big, and that has no easy answer either. So many times it comes down to that old "I know it when I see it" answer, but we rarely do have the chance to see these farms, and thus we come full circle back to the need for reliable labels that tell us at least some of what we need to know.

It's also possible to get so precious in our search for perfection that things begin to feel ludicrous. I saw a new catalog for "eco-style" clothing the other day, wherein a simple black skirt had a provenance of being stitched of organic cotton by blind nuns in a remote corner of India, or something like that . . . it sounded like a parody. How about learning to sew a skirt yourself? It's easy, really. I can teach you. Living without greed and making good, thoughtful choices most of the time, rather than living in a holier-than-thou competition, may reduce our footprint and help those blind nuns in India more than buying another stylish black skirt.

Back to Mosely; his thoughtful essay forces us to realize that the world is incredibly complex.  Our actions have consequences, often unexpected ones. Bandwagons can easily get weighed down and lose sight of their destination. Yet in the end, all of the dialogue about where food comes from is important and a great credit to the organic movement, and the growing acknowledgment that food choices matter to our environmental, social and economic future is a victory along the way.

Comments are welcome!