Let Texadelphia worry about food-miles

I certainly don't care if someone wants to eats locally grown food.  If you prefer local food because it is fresher or tastier, great.  If you enjoy shopping at the farmer's market, swell.  Prefer local varieties?  Happy hunting. 

The "eat local" crowd does a fair amount of moralizing, though.  They frequently suggest that we all ought to be buying locally-grown food.  How far our food travels evidently has become a moral issue.  By reducing our food-miles, the argument goes, we will reduce our fuel consumption.

But "food-miles" is the wrong metric.  The correct metric is the amount of fuel used to transport a pound of food (or some other given amount).  We don't care how far our tomato traveled; we care how much fuel it took to get it from there to here.

I'm skeptical that moving food even long distances has to use much fuel per pound.  For example, an 18-wheeler can haul 30,000 pounds of tomatoes 1,500 miles from Florida to Texas at 5 mpg.  That's a hundred pounds per gallon. At $4/gallon of diesel . . . I'll save you the arithmetic:  that works out to just 4 cents to move one pound.  You'll burn more fuel per pound making a separate trip to the grocery store for bread and milk.  You'll probably burn more fuel per pound just backing your car out of the driveway to make a separate trip for bread and milk.

I realize it costs a lot more than 4 cents/pound to move those tomatoes from Florida to Texas.  The trucker has to be paid, the trucking company gets its cut, etc.  But we're worried about fuel.  A pound of food can travel a long way on just a tiny amount of fuel. 

The food-milers make another mistake, perhaps one worse than fixating on the wrong metric.  They ignore the fact that lots of energy is used at every step of the soil-to-plate cycle.  Fertilizer.  Irrigation.  Tilling.  Harvesting.  Storage.  Processing.  Transportation.  Everyone knows that the recent surge in food prices was caused by the sustained surge in fuel prices (aggravated by the government's edict that we fuel our cars with food). 

This is an important reason not to worry about fuel miles.  It's actually very, very tricky to calculate the amount of energy used to get food from the ground to the market.  Growing conditions matter a lot.  Florida growers can grow 2 or 3 times or more tomatoes per acre than Texas growers.  Local growers thus start at a huge energy disadvantage unless they are using radical farming methods that use no energy (also known as "subsistence farming").  It's quite possible that they cannot close the energy gap despite their advantage in transportation costs.   

Because the cost of energy makes up such a large percentage of the cost of food, it makes no sense to minimize just one component of the energy cost.    You'll be apt to maximize something else.  Just look at the price.  It may not be a perfect indicator of your food's energy cost, but it is the most reliable indicator you've got. 

The handy thing about market prices is that if long-haul transportation costs are a large fraction of an item's cost, grocers have an incentive to find local sources.  (At least they do if they expect prices to stay high; it may be too much trouble to switch sources for a temporary spike.) 

Perhaps that's actually beginning to happen, as this story suggests:

Like all restaurants, Texadelphia sees food prices spike when gas prices do. Produce presents a big problem.

"Gas prices have caused everything food-wise to go up, but with produce in particular, because produce is something that is delivered daily," says Jeremy Wright, general manager of the Texadelphia location on 'the Drag' at the University of Texas campus.

So Texadelphia is finding a shorter route between the farm and its tables.

"We try to look and see if we can still get a good quality product, but be able to get it in more locally, or something that's closer, in order to be able to combat those rising gas prices," says Wright.

Produce the restaurant used to get from California is now coming from local suppliers or Mexico.

"It's actually coming in at about a third less cost coming in from Mexico," says Wright.

I'm not sure that switching from Californian to Mexican suppliers is what most locavores would consider "localizing" the food supply.  (And doesn't the Mexican government heavily subsidize gasoline use?)  I don't know whether grocers and restaurants are really switching en masse to local suppliers to save fuel.  The nice thing about relying on the price as a guide is I don't have to worry about it.  Texadelphia (and H.E.B.) will worry about it for me.

P.S.  You can compare crop yields between states at the USDA site.  (You can compare, e.g., Texas and Florida tomato yields -- Florida got 3.0 and 3.5 times the Texas yields in 2006 and 2007.)

As for my estimate of 18-wheeler fuel use, see this Washington Post story (via Ryan Avent):

A train can haul a ton of freight 423 miles on one gallon of diesel fuel, about a 3-to-1 fuel efficiency advantage over 18-wheelers . . .

This implies that an 18-wheeler can haul one ton 1,500 miles on 9 gallons, or over 200 pounds/gallon -- just 2 cents/gallonpound at $4/gallon of diesel.

Comments

[natrius]

While eating locally might not make economic sense, the bigger the market for local food now, the more prepared we'll be if gas becomes prohibitively expensive before we start using something else. The holier-than-thou attitude is silly, but it could end up helping us all out in the end.

[decon]

Also, while less fuel will be used to transport locally grown food to the end consumer, it is likely that the local producer is not nearly as fuel efficient as the factory farm. It's not clear that minimizing transport distance minimizes fuel consumed.

[a different a.c.]

You're mistaking an essentially marketing or political argument for a technical, economic one. Local food, like sustainability, is an argument for a better system (albeit a somewhat fuzzy one at times). Transitioning to the system is rough, and at times almost surely looks like a step backwards. I would liken it to increasing density in a place like Austin. In the long term, more density means less car traffic. In the short term, though, more density is often going to mean more traffic, because we're simply not set up for denser living--not only don't we have good transit for it, but we don't have the fine-grained mix of secondary uses that gets people, even high rise condo livers, out of their cars.

So, yes, you can pick through and find the inconsistencies in the current local food market, where it doesn't quite make for an overall environmental improvement. But that's missing the larger picture. And, yeah, I do think that a local food system is vastly better for people than a distant food system.

Sorry to rant. While I do think people *ought* to eat locally, it's not something I really lecture people about. My stridency here is the stridency of argument, not moral fervor. :)

[Martin]

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Buy the cheapest thing? I think your argument is built on a number of incorrect assumptions.
The first question I have is that you are basing part of your arguement on the price of gasoline. I think most, especially those concerned about food miles, would argue that the price of gasoline is already hugely subsidized and one problem of the industry growers is that they take advantage of this subsidy when they move food so far, thus insuring a lower price but higher negative external costs that aren't accounted for (emissions, cost of infrastructure etc).
Similarly you mention Mexican growers. They again are taking advantage of costs that don't show up in the food price but are born by us no matter what we eat. Mexican growers paying poverty wages or using sharecrop-type operations help spread the poverty and disatisfaction of laborers in that country which sets off a whole cycle of 'illegal' immigration that we all know too much about. The same can be said of the industrial growers in CA and FL that employe said immigrants (again, keeping shown prices low, but hidden prices high).
Also, it seems like they're are lots of wholes in your argument taken up by unsubstantiated claims. Here are 2:
"Florida growers can grow 2 or 3 times or more tomatoes per acre than Texas growers."
"You'll burn more fuel per pound making a separate trip to the grocery store for bread and milk."
Like you said, alot of this is tricky but you're making some pretty liberal steps in your logic. First of all, I doubt that it really takes so much more energy to grow a tomatoe in one place than another- especially in fairly similar climates as exist in Florida and Texas (I'm grew up on the gulf coast- talk about humid and hot!)
On the second one you're assuming that these are all seperate trips done by vehicle. I've seen many more bicyclist at the farmer's market than HEB on most trips there (which I like to take by bike). These are usually held in places closer into houses (like the triangle) and I would argue more transit/ped/bike friendly than the HEB stores (try navigating through a huge heb parking lot on bike). Also, Texas French bread and other bread makers are usually at the market. If you pick up the majority of your goods at the market and just have a couple things to get I think you'd be more likely to combine a quick trip to the store with another than a whole grocery list trip- or just get it from the corner store on your evening walk. I say that's a good assumption as what you're making.
Look, honestly I don't do the majority of my shopping at the farmer's market. I'm on a fixed budget and don't always have time when they're opened. I usually go to the supermarket like everyone else. I'm not trying to be 'better-than' anyone else. But I have lived in places where it was possible to get fresh, local food from a weekly market and the reason that was because of demand and because of local support for local growers. So I will always support local growing when I can.
Lastly, I agree with you that price is a good indicator. Things that are the cheapest are usually in-season and very often local(ish). But when I see $1.99/lb or less grapes in the dead of winter at my local heb I make sure and read the label. More often than not they are shipped in from Chile or New Zealand or some far off place (apples for NZ). I'd rather wait and each in season, atleast CA grapes in the summer which are .99 cents/lbs. This isn't exactly local but I think your arguement falls pretty flat when we're talking about getting produce flown or shipped over oceans. To me that's just a terrible sign of an almost total lack of though about what our 'i want it now' culture is doing. I love eating Rio red grapefruits and other citrus from the valley, a great assortment of mushrooms grown in gonzales, TX, local tomatoes and other great and fresh produce that can be found in local hebs- not to mention great hill country wines!, in season and at a good price. I'll take those over new zealand apples any day.

[AC]

Martin, you're missing the point. Although fuel -- including gasoline -- is not priced to reflect all externalities, fuel is used throughout the food-production cycle. By focusing just on fuel used for long-distance transportation, you ignore that locally-grown food may use more fuel somewhere else in the process. Food-miles is a crappy way of measuring how much fuel your food used. If that's why you're buying local food, you're fooling yourself.

See here for data comparing Texas and Florida tomato yields per acre. http://www.nass.usda.gov/QuickStats/PullData_US.jsp

The bigger point is that some places have a comparative advantage in growing some kinds of crops. That's why we don't have localized production anymore. Localized production meant less food, lower quality food, susceptibility to famine, and a bunch of other bad things.

I'm not saying buy the cheapest food. I usually don't. I spend money on quality, which means local food (sometimes).

Don't buy local food to save fuel, though. You probably won't.

[that other a.c.]

I wrote out a long response to one line in your comment to Martin. But going back to the original entry, I think it's a little beside the point. I do agree that overall costs ought to be brought in line the impacts, covering all stages of getting food to the door. But I also think that food-miles is a convenient shorthand for talking about the issue, which may not be right in all respects, but gets the gist of it. (I've been thinking a lot about this, particularly in light of this kind of thing, with me wondering how close what I'm arguing for is to that.)

Anyway, since I wrote that big whole thing, I'm going to go ahead and post it, even though I think it's a little off the mark of what you were originally saying.

===Localized production meant less food, lower quality food, susceptibility to famine, and a bunch of other bad things.===

Localized production doesn't necessarily mean that at all. I mean, a straw man version of it can, sure, and the 100-mile publicity stunt, maybe. I think very few are arguing that we should do away with a global food market entirely. It's a matter of where the balance of our food comes, not the totality.

Also, local food is probably higher quality, since local farmers can use varieties that weren't hybridized to withstand rugged shipping requirements, and can instead use varieties that were grown for taste. Granted, the global food market does do a better job of visual consistency and plumpness.

I also think you're firing too quick from the hip on famine. You're taking a primarily first-world argument and attaching a third-world catastrophe to it. Local food isn't going to cause famines in the U.S. And even if we look globally, my understanding is that one of causes of continual famine in Africa is the lack of a local food production. Subsidized crops in the U.S. and developed world undercut the ability of African farmers to make a living, which makes them completely dependent on the global food supply. Which means, if something happens to that food supply, like high oil prices ... (Those are ellipses of doom, by the way.)

Mike Davis wrote an absolutely fantastic book about this, called "Late Victorian Holocausts," about how the combination of El Nino cycles and colonialism created the third world, in part by wiping out local farming economies and introducing the global food market. It's a dense read, but pretty stunning. One of the key points is that, prior to their introduction to the global food market, these entirely local food systems weathered famines mostly okay (in their own terms; I don't doubt that it's what we would recognize as deprivation), through internal food savings based on norms and local markets. Doing away with those internal checks was one of the major things that exposed the people in these countries to the vagaries of the El Nino system.

To climb off my soapbox for a moment, I do think a robust local food system, with links to a global food system, is better. I do think people ought to buy local food now, as a way of creating that system. But I also think people ought to go the speed limit. So ... (Those are ellipses of the ironic pause.) There are definitely a lot of weak arguments in favor of local food, but I think the overall, long-term case for it is strong.

[M1EK]

the other a.c. has laid it my view of it pretty well - there are likely to be substantial disruptions when changing from the old system (cheap, highly subsidized trucking) to the new system (presumably expensive, and not subsidized trucking). Disruptions which could be substantial enough that the market may not even be allowed to handle them as well as it could (and that's not likely to be as well as we'd prefer).

The first-best solution would be of course to stop subsidizing freight trucking - but that's not going to happen in the current political environment. The next-best solution is to try to at least get people to prepare for the day when the amount we can afford to subsidize won't be enough to keep it cheap.

[Matt Turner]

I know you're probably not a fan of Robert Pooles, but he has some interesting points in his last newsletter on this subject.

From Robert Pooles's April 2008 newsletter Surface Transportation Innovations

Food and Transportation

We’re all going to be hearing a lot of nonsense in the name of reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the years ahead. One of the trendiest ideas in Britain is the concept of “food miles”—the distance a food product must travel before you consume it. Leading-edge U.K. supermarkets like Tesco are now labeling all their products with “carbon labels,” based on calculations by the Carbon Trust. People increasingly assume that they should be “eating local to save the planet,” since transporting food over great distances must lead to greater GHG production.

But, as George Gershwin wrote in the last century, “It ain’t necessarily so.” A recent article in The New Yorker (“Big Foot,” by Michael Specter, Feb. 25, 2008) was quite eye-opening. Specter interviewed agricultural researchers in Europe and the United States and came up with some surprising findings. For example, it is more “green” for New Yorkers to drink wine from Bordeaux (shipped by sea) than from Napa (shipped by truck). The GHG impact of importing apples from New Zealand to Northern Europe is less than if the apples came from 50 miles away. Why? Adrian Williams of Cranfield University explained to Specter that the yield of NZ apples far exceeds the yield of apples grown in northern climates, so the latter use far more energy per apple, offsetting the energy used in transportation. The same applies to NZ lamb, versus British lamb. Even some products shipped by air end up having lower GHG impact than locally produced ones in Europe. For example, a Cranfield study compared roses for Valentine’s Day shipped to Britain from Holland (grown in heated greenhouses) with those shipped by air from Kenya. The carbon footprint of the Dutch roses was six times that of Kenyan roses.

[Martin]

Again, I think you're grasping at straws here A.C. I agree with 'that other' that 'food miles' isn't language meant only and exclusively for the transportation ONLY. As I brought up in my original post I think people interested in 'food miles' are not only interested in transportation costs but social costs and a broader idea of environmental and social justice issues related to industrialized food.
I agree that these are difficult things to measure and the hollow points in your post are proof of that. Besides your link not working properly I think it is a big stretch to take one particular crop, compare two states and say your proving a point. I like reading the AC b/c usually your research is well thought out and while I understand the basic logic you're following in your post the research/stats on this one is just not cutting it.
I think another big point that you and the quotes in Matt Turner's post are missing is this- Eating local and eating in season (another important thing to try and do) is also about CHANGING YOUR EATING HABITS. Yes, of course if you choose to eat strictly local then you should be, in theory, cutting many things out of your diet. I don't know local suppliers of bananas, coffee, kiwi or peanuts to name a few. But there are plenty of crops that grow beautifully here in Austin and surroundings. Just go visit sunshine gardens or kevin at the community gardens in san marcos or just the local farmers market to understand that. My friend Kevin in the community gardens there in s.m. grows a dazzling assortment of greens and lettuce that you will never find in central market, fiesta or anywhere.
Austin is actually a great place to eat locally because our city lies on the division between the Texas Hill Country- think pecans, peaches, grapes/wine, even some operations there are experimenting with olives as well as goat products and the Blackland Plains- think squash, watermelon, cucumbers, corn, grains, range beef on down to the (a bit further away) Gulf Coast and Rio Grande Valley- citrus, okra, rice, fish.
Sure, when you're talking about eating local you're saying that you don't need industrialized, hormonized, polished food from far off places but that you're interested in establishing yourself andyour eating habits in the cultural and geographical context of where you live. As I said before, this is a rejection of the "I want it now" instant gratification consumer culture that Americans so revel in. Local eating is not a decline in food quality of a famine-inducing activity. All that is is another example of how way off your logic on this post is.
You know, France and Europe didn't get to their great culinary culture because they're blessed with some special soil or geography that we don't have here. Its that way because their agriculture grew up at a time where people ate what was available and they still do today to a large extent.
My final point is this- as 'that other' said 'food miles' is a rallying cry for a whole host of people who want to focus on local culture and place as a unifying place. You're incorrect in assuming it is only about the transportation-based carbon footprint of food (although I and other still maintain this is important). It is about social and environmental costs as well as the affects on culture that industrialized farming has on communities- both consuming and producing areas.

[M1EK]

Matt, that's all good stuff - but those are outliers.

The key here is that we can't even get the explicit subsidies on fossil fuel transportation removed (in fact, idiots like McCain are proposing making them even worse), much less get the externalities internalized, so we've got to work on something else in the meantime and hope that someday down the road, pricing can be used the way it would in the ideal world.

[AC]

The explicit subsidies of fossil fuel don't matter to my argument. What matters is that growing stuff locally may use a lot more extra fuel than transporting stuff long distances. Buying locally-grown stuff may waste more fuel than buying stuff grown more efficiently elsewhere. There's no reason to believe Matt's examples are outliers. As fuel prices continue to climb, the smart thing may be to rely even more heavily on regions with a significant comparative advantage.

For this reason, M1EK and that other a.c., I don't see any need to develop a robust local farming economy.

Martin, I don't see any "social cost" to eating food grown elsewhere. But, trust me, I'm not arguing that people ought to buy the cheapest food. If you prefer locally grown food, or you want to eat seasonally, whatever, that's fine with me, even if it uses more fuel. I don't think I have an obligation to monitor my "food-miles," though, and think it's counter-productive to do so, even ignoring that it's a poor measure of energy used. (Thanks for letting me know about the bad link).

[Martin]

AC- I'll let you have the last word but I must say that again- you can't just pick the way you want to measure something and then say that your claim is right.
See: "The explicit subsidies of fossil fuel don't matter to my argument. What matters is that growing stuff locally may use a lot more extra fuel than transporting stuff long distances."
If you want to actually measure what's going on, what spends more fuel, what has more cost, more emission, etc then you can't leave any factor out. You can't just pick your two desired variables to measure (extra fuel transporting vs. yield in of a certain crop)and use that as your base for writing off local food.
Another thing you should certainly not write off is the working conditions (one example of social cost)that many farm workers face. This is especially the case in countries lower on the economic scale like Chile, Guatemala, Mexico that send lots of cheap industralized produce here.
I stumbled across this article today on the bbc and thought of these posts. While we're not discussing Greek strawberries I think its very close to what's going on in many places (including industrialized food production here in this country). Small family farms don't do this type of thing. Again, just an example of true social costs that you shouldn't ignore.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7357762.stm
You said its fine with you if I eat local, in season or whatever. Thank you. Like I said I'd like to do alot more of it, but as you said, the prices just aren't there yet for many things. No one's perfect and that's not the goal here. The goal should be to be aware that our everyday decisions affect and are affected by thousands of actions and increasingly have world-wide effects. There is a cost, financial, social, cultural that is born by someone no matter what is produced. We are kidding ourselves we our only rally cry is "low prices, always". The full costs may not be born by the american consumer, atleast at the moment of purchase, but we will all have our reckoning and have to pay full price one day- or someone else will. To me, that is not a responsible way to live and make choices.
Lastly, I'm not saying that's what you're doing. I understand you said you're not just looking for the cheap price. But please don't write off local food on the account of your poor analysis. I don't think thats helpful for any of us. I just think we all can be more aware of what our choices mean to ourselves and others. You made many good points but you really can't prove much of what you're claiming.

[M1EK]

ac, I mean that we can't tell for sure whether the local or far-away farm is more efficient when prices are this badly broken, so it's reasonable to go either way. That's all.

[Brian]

Don't know if anybody is still looking here, but there was a related article in yesterday's NYTimes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/business/worldbusiness/26food.html