Monday, June 9, 2008

Foodie Alert

Wanna be a locavore, getting most of your food locally to reduce the carbon footprint while supporting local farmers?
Sounds good, but as the saying goes, common sense has one big problem, it may be common but it may not make sense.
Consider a study cited in this New Republic article:
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..it's striking to learn that, on average, replacing just 21 percent of the red meat in the "typical" diet with fish or chicken does as much, emissions-wise, as buying everything in that same diet locally. Another big surprise is that the far-flung globalization of the food chain that Pollan describes seems to have had a relatively small impact on global greenhouse-gas emissions, in part because ocean freight still accounts for 99 percent of all international transport, and that uses far less energy than trucking. That's unexpected, and it sounds like even the authors were surprised by the result.

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