Stephen Budiansky loves eating vegetables from his own garden and appreciates the value of fresh ingredients, but still wonders whether the “local food” movement has gone overboard. From his recent NYT op-ed:
the local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas. Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel by “locavores,” celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental organizations. Words like “sustainability” and “food-miles” are thrown around without any clear understanding of the larger picture of energy and land use.The result has been all kinds of absurdities. For instance, it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley.
The statistics brandished by local-food advocates to support such doctrinaire assertions are always selective, usually misleading and often bogus.
As Budiansky explains, transportation does not account for the bulk of energy use in our food system. There are also substantial environmental gains to be had by growing food where it is most productive to do so. Growing food locally may mean less shipping, but it often means producing far less per acre, and that means taking up more land to produce the same amount of food — land that could be used for other things, including habitat. Indeed, were it not for increases in agricultural productivity over the past several decades, hundreds of millions (if not billions) of additional acres would be under plow. Budiansky has more on his blog here and here.
ruuffles says:
What is the advantage of eating what is in season? For example, this past year, I discovered easy peal clementines, namely cuties. Unfortunately, they are only available October to April. Thus I went dry for a couple months until I found a different grocery with a different brand of slightly less easy to peel clementines.
August 21, 2010, 12:13 pmBrett Bellmore says:
Wasn’t the point, in the beginning, that genuinely ripe fruits and vegetables don’t travel well? So you had to buy local to get good quality? I mean, I’m fine with eating tomatoes shipped across country when it’s too cold to raise them locally, but the most convenient thing about them is that you can catch them on the bounce if you drop one…
The down side of that is that the local market is selling, locally raised, the exact same ‘turn red without actually ripening’ variety of tomatoes that they sell shipped in from California in colder weather. So, what’s the point?
August 21, 2010, 12:30 pmRosemary says:
I like to eat Dandelion and Poke Salad with Herb straight from my organically maintained lawn of native grasses. He’s picking the leaves as we speak.
August 21, 2010, 12:46 pmFub says:
True, and depending on where “local” was, prices in season were drastically lower in my experience.
My experience was 50+ years ago, working several seasons in peach packing. Labor (mine) was about $.50/hour. A bushel of “over ripe” peaches, culled from the packing line and sold locally at the packing shed, was about $.50 and much less if you brought your own containers. Shippable bushels retailed for several dollars at big city grocery stores.
The “over ripes”, which could accurately be described these days as “tree ripened”, were tastier too. But if you got ‘em in the morning, you’d better eat ‘em or can ‘em before sundown. Within a day or so they would only be good for making jam or compote. They didn’t keep well, for obvious reasons.
Hope you’re b’iling it thrice.
August 21, 2010, 1:36 pmJK says:
All reasonable points, but I’ve never been a big fan of skewering consumers for trying to to the morally right thing because the details of their impact analysis are suspect. It always seems like a roundabout justification for not giving a shit whatsoever.
August 21, 2010, 1:53 pmRosemary says:
Fub, funny you should mention it– I’m making jam of my overly ripe peaches, currently.
August 21, 2010, 1:57 pmfrankcross says:
No, JK, its a justification for being knowledgeable and intelligent about impact analyses.
But the locavores I know do it more for taste than for environmental impact.
August 21, 2010, 1:59 pmjuris imprudent says:
This is nothing but another form of conspicuous consumption. Consuming to establish status – Gucci or Coach applied to food.
August 21, 2010, 2:09 pmJK says:
Really? No forgiveness for rational ignorance? Do you seriously have a solid grasp on the environmental impact of everything, or even most things, that you buy?
August 21, 2010, 2:13 pmHarry Eagar says:
I’m not giving up chocolate, oysters and wheat just because they aren’t grown here.
August 21, 2010, 2:27 pmfrankcross says:
I’ll forgive rational ignorance. But I’m not above pointing out the ignorance part. That seems like a good thing to do.
Budiansky is not skewering people for trying to do the right thing. He is pointing out that they are wrong.
August 21, 2010, 3:24 pmbearing says:
I’m all for reducing the carbon footprint of my food, but I’m dismayed that pro-local-food folks never seem to take into account the efficiencies brought about by large-scale distribution networks. Sure, the three big-box grocery-store tomatoes on my counter may have come from far away, but did they take into account the fact that the same truck transported many, many cases of tomatoes, and that the incremental mileage of those three tomatoes is pretty small compared to the mileage of driving to the farmer’s market to fetch three “local” tomatoes…
I used to belong to a dairy co-op where every member arrived in a car once a week to pick up her family’s glass bottles of milk from grass-fed cows. Great milk, and that was reason enough to belong, but it struck me that probably we were using a lot more fuel to get that milk than if we’d not made the extra trip and had just bought store milk. I drove 15 miles to get that milk every week.
August 21, 2010, 3:29 pmJ says:
I don’t know that they’re loco, but some seem to be seriously not up to speed on things like economies of scale, particularly in transportation. It takes less gas to ship a ton of tomatoes from California to New York City by rail than it does to drive a ton of tomatoes in from someplace upstate.
“No forgiveness for rational ignorance?”
Locovores clearly believe their philosophy is better for the environment than consuming food produced at large scale farms thousands of miles away. It’s not, and once they know that it shouldn’t be cited as a rationale. The economic rationale holds up a little better, but still amounts to turning locally produced food into a vanity product similar to organic food. I’ll be the first to defend anyone’s right to do that, but stop telling me it enhances “sustainability” or helps the environment, because it doesn’t.
August 21, 2010, 3:33 pmJohn A says:
I will wait to see the reality show featuring fights between locavores and fregans in downtown New York City or Chicago.
August 21, 2010, 3:35 pmDan Goodman says:
In Minneapolis, “locally grown” includes the states bordering Minnesota.
It does not include Manitoba and Ontario, which also border Minnesota.
August 21, 2010, 4:26 pmStephen Lathrop says:
I lived for a time in Idaho, where the motto on the license plate said, “Famous Potatoes.”
Potatoes sold out of the farmers’ fields at Twin Falls for about $.03 a pound. Then the potatoes got shipped about 800 miles to a wholesaler in Los Angeles, then shipped back to Idaho, where they sold for about $.39 a pound at the supermarket at Boise—about 130 miles from Twin Falls. (That was decades ago. But if you are a market fundamentalist, please explain the present cost of potatoes in the field vs. the cost in the market, anywhere, because it sure looks like market failure to me.)
When gas prices spiked a couple years ago, food prices went up sharply in Massachusetts, where I now live. I asked the grocers how come, they said it was the increased cost of transportation. Assuming I understood something about transportation costs and efficiencies, I thought it was mostly price gouging. But I leave it to the market fundamentalists to take up the grocers’ cause.
The whole locavore thing may indeed be looney, just as many aspects of the organic food thing are looney. The trick is to figure out how much of the looniness may be inherent, and how much results from the interaction with existing food market practices, which may be all too rational.
August 21, 2010, 4:44 pmDrew Cloutier says:
Was listening to a radio commercial for a Santa Fe, NM restaurant yesterday that was touting that all of their vegetables were locally and organically grown. They also touted their ahi tuna dish.
August 21, 2010, 5:23 pmMike says:
The problem is when they get their way politically, such as the new initiatives to improve children’s health by requiring schools to include local and organic vegetables in their meals. Because the problem with children’s lunches is that they have to travel to far and are grown using modern methods, not that they’re poorly cooked, over-salted crap that kids bypass as much as possible in favor of fruit roll ups and french fries.
August 21, 2010, 5:30 pmwhit says:
when i lived in hawaii, one could buy pineapples at the grocery store. there were pineapple fields literally 1/2 mile from the grocery store. the cost of the pineapples in hawaii, 1/2 mile from the fields was MORE expensive than the price for the same pineapples in california. i’m not sure what that says about economy of transport etc. in the long run, but it shows the obscene taxes and cost structure present in hawaii, such that it costs more to buy produce grown within a few miles than it does to buy it after it’s shipped from the most isolated archipelago in the world to the mainland.
August 21, 2010, 5:54 pmwhit says:
also, as far as the whole organics thing goes…
i find it rather telling that the same people (liberals) who are all about “science and reason” when it comes to evolution, etc. all of a sudden start sounding like a weird combination of luddites and creationists when it comes to food. nowhere is this more noticeable than in the whole organics thang (although the hormones in the meat hysteria comes close… )
there is not a single study that shows that there is any significant benefit to organic vs. non-organic produce (nutrition, etc.). i refuse to buy organic because i am waiting for the market to come to me, so to speak. there is no way *i* can justify paying 20-80% more for something merely because it’s “organic”.
but chemicals are like “icky” and stuff, which pretty much describes the scientific rigor when applied to organics vs. non-organics.
some organics may and do taste better. some don’t.
August 21, 2010, 5:58 pmEli Rabett says:
The major difference between food grown far away and food grown nearby is that the later can be picked when it is much riper. Food from far away goes through a long distribution chain, and for the most part has to be picked well before its prime (in taste and nutrition), which is why sensible people put a premium on the local food from trusted distributors and that includes restaurants.
An interesting exception to this are the many ethnic markets (in Eli’s area, mostly the Korean supermarkets), who will buy stuff that falls out of the commercial chain because it has ripened too quickly (and thus is better to eat) but you better sell it fast. The choice between getting hit by a baseball or a Safeway peach is a hard one.
August 21, 2010, 6:46 pmChris Travers says:
I like to eat salads and poke dandelions ;-)
(Yes, I know what you meant. Having fun with ambiguity of language.)
August 21, 2010, 7:20 pmrb1971 says:
I used to be reasonably good friends in NY with a woman who was originally the assistant to, then the director of, the Union Square market. I bought a lot of stuff from there over the years, and found that the quality was consistently pretty good, some of the local cheeses were fantastic, etc. But when I made this point to her (and pointed out that locally-grown organics were sometimes 4x what similar products cost, which meant that the poor were unlikely to have access to her products), she basically said it was part of a movement, and made unsupported arguments that as the movement grew those things would work themselves out. I will say that she was self-aware enough to admit (maybe just to friends) that her goal was good local foods, not necessarily environmental impact, but the organization itself definitely pushed that angle.
August 21, 2010, 9:00 pmHarry Eagar says:
whit, all you observed in Hawaii was the high cost of commercial real estate and the overhead of carrying a slow-selling product like whole pineapples. Nothing to do with pineapples or transportation costs as such.
August 21, 2010, 9:56 pmAnatid says:
We had some of these at the student co-op in Berkeley … several of them were trying to get the kitchen manager to stop ordering out-of-season tomatoes. One of them, while giving his speech, was eating a mango. In February. When I pointed this out, his response was word-for-word, “Well, I may be a hypocrite, but I’m still right.”
I can say though, one habit I’ve taken from the co-op is a preference for free-range milk. I’ve lost my taste for drinking milk straight (exception: when there are cookies) but there’s a local dairy up north that makes the tastiest milk I have ever had the pleasure to drink. It’s a luxury item, and worth the cost whenever I can afford it. But that’s just it: it’s a luxury item, not better for the environment.
August 21, 2010, 10:47 pmConstantin says:
I totally don’t care. I’m almost at the point where I will conspicuously consume goods that aren’t claimed as eco-friendly, just out of spite.
August 22, 2010, 12:04 amGil says:
The primary reason I heard is that proponents want to eat fruit and vegetables that are fresh rather than to save the environment. If they pay for it out of their own pocket so what? It’s the same as food grown specifically to be used for cars – it may hurt the poor through higher food prices but if those who are buying the ethanol have done so through free market transactions then so what? After all, many people prefer to eat meat which equally hurt the poor because grain is used to feed animals not people thus raising food prices as easily as ethanol. So is everyone required to become vegetarians so food prices are cheap as possible for the poor or should the poor start creating their own wealth and stop being poor?
August 22, 2010, 1:26 amReaderY says:
The “negative commerce clause” is based on a presumption that interstate commerce is always good — it’s always better when the economy occurs nationally rather than locally.
But this presumption isn’t always true. Sometimes local is better. Are locovores right? Is the presumption as faulty as they say? Can’t say. But whether they are right, or wrong, or partly right and partly wrong, evaluating their viewpoint should be solely the business of legislatures, not of courts.
August 22, 2010, 1:32 amwhit says:
actually, it’s a bit more than that. there was a book called “the price of paradise” that explains much better than I can some of the reasons for the obscene prices there (think : excise taxes, and all sorts of other hidden costs)…
regardless of WHY, it is still ridiculous that something that is grown a mile from the grocery store and requires no processing whatsoever (apart from being picked) costs more THERE than after it is shipped across 1/2 of the pacific ocean, unloaded and distributed to grocery stores a hundred miles from the coast.
regardless of WHY, it’s ridiculous from a common sense angle.
people in Saudi Arabia, for instance, do not pay more for gas than people here…
August 22, 2010, 5:34 amwhit says:
the isssue with hormones in meat is especially ridiculous. i personally prefer the taste of grass fed beef, but when it comes to hormones in beef, there is NO reason whatsoever that one should eschew it. I have challenged people over and over and there is never a SCIENTIFIC answer about why meat that comes from cows that are given hormones (bovine growth hormone or implants etc.) should be ANY less desirable.
it all comes down to “well, it’s icky” essentially.
August 22, 2010, 5:36 amwhit says:
i am perfectly willing to pay for QUALITY, but i refuse to pay for organics merely because they are organic. there is nothing BETTER about organics, from an endpoint status. they aren’t more nutritious and they do not taste better.
generally speaking, fruits etc. that are picked ripe (vs. picked unripe and allowed to ripen during transit) DO taste better, but that’s completely tangential to whether they were grown organically.
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August 22, 2010, 11:18 amsubpatre says:
The problem of quality food is multifaceted, but certainly one place to start is the (truly rational) rational ignorance of food shoppers. Exhibited here in this thread is the confusion of posters between the locavore movement and the FDA ‘organic’ label, of which 80% comes from China.
The ‘buy local’ food movement aka ‘locavore’ is a quasi-libertarian movement in that it posits by buying local, by knowing each other, both producer and consumer will be or become more responsible to the other. That theory is by no means foolproof, but in the fraction of the market it occupies, seems to work.
Rational ignorance is also the result of government-promoted fictions about nutrition. The “food pyramid”, promoted in school health classes and government extension offices from the 1930s through this century is a deliberate lie. Look no further than government propaganda for causes to any ‘obesity epidemic’. The pyramid had nothing to do with complete or wholesome human nutrition; it was an expression of producer economics and who the government wanted rewarded.
Rational ignorance is often rational. Even a person reasonably informed on nutrition cannot use that knowledge when the government controls nutritional information on food packaging. This same government agency –despite enormous strides in nutrition and the biosciences– refuses to recognize nutritional requirements discovered or refined after WWII.
Whit’s confusion between nutrition of organic-labeled and ‘other’ food is rational, but ignorant. Despite enormous differences in appearance, texture, and taste –all the result of differences in chemical content– the standard government-industrial claim is there is no difference in nutrients . . . when ‘nutrients’ are predefined by the government and industry.
Whit has a sharp mind, but he and millions of others are operating in an environment that controls not only their educational on food, but also prohibits public disclosure of nutritional facts. Rational ignorance should be expected, perhaps the norm, but it should be no surprise that government in loco parentis yields significant numbers of plain old locos.
August 22, 2010, 12:46 pmBrett Bellmore says:
I ask for directions to the ceramic foods, but grocery clerks just don’t get the joke. “Organic” goods? The only inorganic foods I ever eat are salt, and water…
August 22, 2010, 1:52 pmThrobert McGee says:
The other day I noticed packages of Domino sugar in yellow-and-green bags, instead of Domino’s trademark yellow-and-blue. Looking closer, I got my explanation: this was SPECIAL sugar that had been certified “Carbonfree™”!
[sic -- not "carbon-free," but "Carbonfree™", complete with italics]
I was laughing too hard to check
August 22, 2010, 2:48 pmwhether there was ahow much the price markup was between the Carbonfree™ and carbonfull versionsof Domino sugar. (I usually buy the “generic” store-branded sugar anyway, unless the Domino is marked down that week.)
karrde says:
Well, I’m a different kind of locavore.
There’s a decently-high set of one-time costs, and there’s a large investment of time.
But I get a chance to take locally-grown, naturally-fed, open range meat (venison, duck, turkey, pheasant, and even rabbit) under a program run by my State’s Department of Natural Resources.
I’m not sure of the total ecological impact of this, but I do know that it can contribute to reducing stress on certain wildlife populations by contributing to thinning the herd. Thus, fewer will be in danger of starving over the lean winter.
Sadly, my part in this activity has been rather small, and I have yet to harvest much meat. But it’s great fun, and provides a way to commune with nature.
Who knew that hunting was such an ecologically-defensible lifestyle?
August 22, 2010, 4:10 pmChris Travers says:
Actually, one key issue I think is the difficulty in trying to understand the bizarre idea of trying to expect local food to work well in a supermarket system designed for widespread distribution.
Personally I buy a lot of my vegetables during the summer at farmers’ markets. Tomatos, corn, etc. I also buy honey there though not for much longer because I figure I really want to start raising my own bees (yes, in town– no problem doing that if I can get a few practical elements figured out).
I also try to buy a side of beef every year or two from local sources. This is quite a bit cheaper in part because there is less in the way of overhead, and the animal is butchered individually meaning less capacity for cross-contamination. The downside is…. freezer space…..
I am also looking into whether I can legally raise chickens in town. So far I see no laws against it in my area. Maybe if that doesn’t work, I will raise them up at my parents’ house (about 5 miles away).
Done right, it costs a lot less and the food tastes better. But then I live in a place where food generally grows well.
August 22, 2010, 7:01 pmChris Travers says:
I have carbon-free sugar that comes right out of my tap!
August 22, 2010, 7:02 pmThrobert McGee says:
Hush, you’re gonna wind up in the concrete foundation of Domino’s new Carbonfree™ production facilities if you keep blabbing like that…
August 22, 2010, 7:19 pmChris Travers says:
Of course they have to mix the concrete with Carbon-Free Sugar (sucrose is C12H22O11, so carbon-free sugar is 11(H2O).
Of course maybe they synthesized Si12H22O11 or some such…..
August 22, 2010, 8:20 pmAnatid says:
The argument I’ve heard is that growth hormone traces in meat and milk may be contributing to the increasingly-early onset of puberty in children in this country. I do not know if this argument has been substantiated or disproven; not my area of expertise.
That said, since low-level exposure to growth hormone in adults appears to offer a modest beneficial effect, when I hear adults making this argument about why they shouldn’t eat hormone-laden products, I roll my eyes.
August 22, 2010, 9:35 pmAJK says:
Really? People in Alaska certainly do…
August 22, 2010, 9:52 pmChris Travers says:
Probably false, but not to my knowledge not proven so.
HOWEVER, I think overall factory farming of animals is horrible and avoid hormones, etc, as much as I can for that reason. I don’t want to be eating things the biology technicians have created for my dinner. Instead I will buy whole (or half) animals from the farmer where I have an idea of how they are raised.
August 23, 2010, 12:46 amDon K says:
Exactly. I have long refused to buy the “tomatoes” imported from CA and FL in the off-season, simply because they’re inedible, grainy, pink things that don’t deserve the noble name of tomato. Luckily, we here in MI now have access to greenhouse tomatoes (a passable substitute) from ON in the winter, and the local tomatoes this summer have been magnificent, red, and juicy (reasonable facsimiles of the tomatoes from Dad’s garden when I was growing up), that make a BLT that is to die for.
Oh, and don’t get me started on sweet corn…
August 23, 2010, 12:49 amRandy says:
Whit; “but chemicals are like “icky” and stuff, which pretty much describes the scientific rigor when applied to organics vs. non-organics.”
Not at all. It is well documented that the chemicals that farmers use to spray their fields throughout the midwest end up in the water supply that is drinking water to millions. I don’t know whether there are studies on whether these chemicals are harmful to humans, but I suspect they aren’t doing a heck of a lot of good.
But it is also well documented that these same chemicals kill off a lot of sea life, creating dead zones throughout the Gulf of Mexico and also here in the Cheasapeake Bay. It’s a major problem, actually.
In other words, to increase the food supply on one part of our planet, we kill off the food supply in another.
August 23, 2010, 12:57 amAnatid says:
In particular, two chemical classes of concern are:
- the xenoestrogens found in pesticides/herbicides, which are already having major impacts on insect, amphibian and fish populations and can impact humans in much higher doses, and
- fertilizers, which feed algae blooms once washed out to sea, which in turn absorb all the available oxygen in the water so fish cannot breathe, creating the dead zones Randy mentioned
Humans are one of the more resilient species to environmental toxins, so it takes higher levels to disrupt us, but nuking the ecosystem around us isn’t a great idea.
August 23, 2010, 1:38 amUrso says:
I’m stealing this quote. Too many people think that if they can prove some foible on the part of the arguer – hypocrisy the most favored foible by far – they’ve somehow disproved the argument itself. It’s a slightly more mature version of responding “yeah well…. you’re ugly!”
August 23, 2010, 11:32 amUrso says:
The negative effect the Gulf of Mexico suffers on a yearly basis from Midwestern farmers dumping tons of phosphorus and other fertilizers into the Mississippi is probably comparable to the effects of the BP oil spill.
August 23, 2010, 11:36 amA. Criminal says:
Liberals hate the concepts and ideas resulting from the study of evolution as much as anyone, perhaps more – because the ideas diametrically oppose the Marxist & blank-slate nonsense which are the foundations of the left’s ideology – and fight against them very strenuously, e.g. James Watson. It’s pretty typical for people to want to feel special and fundamentally different from other animals, but it’s not true, and Lysenko lives on in the US.
August 23, 2010, 11:56 amChris Travers says:
Well, I would have applied it differently. More like “let’s start with banning Mangos.” The point isn’t to show some foible, but to show that the individual doesn’t actually want what they are advocating.
August 23, 2010, 12:03 pmHarry Eagar says:
That’s why there aren’t any sinners.
August 23, 2010, 4:20 pmAnatid says:
Go for it!
James Watson is not, by most of today’s standards, a good example of a liberal. James Watson is a good example of a nutcase. From what I’ve studied of his life, he’s had antisocial tendencies all his life, and we only put up with it because he’s a scientific genius. There’s a reason Rosalind Franklin refused to work with him.
The consolation is that for every James Watson in the field, there’s also a Kary Mullis.
The danger in this is if the person agrees to save face, and then we are at risk for both our tomatoes and our mangoes going away.
August 23, 2010, 7:01 pmHoward says:
It’s just luxury consumption with a green halo ego cherry on top.
August 23, 2010, 9:47 pmRandy says:
Urso: ” Too many people think that if they can prove some foible on the part of the arguer — hypocrisy the most favored foible by far — they’ve somehow disproved the argument itself.”
Actually, I think that the hypocrisy makes it easy to laugh at the person who is committing it. For instance, Newt Gingrinch basically said the same thing when someone caught him giving a lecture on marital fidelity at the time he was cheating on his wife. His response was exactly the same — they he expects fidelity from others, but that he certainly doesn’t believe he should practice it.
It may not disprove the argument, but it surely undermines it, because if the arguer doesn’t believe in it enough for himself, then how can he argue it for others?
August 23, 2010, 11:11 pmRandy says:
Doesn’t the Bible say something about how we should only eat things that are in season? If so, why isn’t the religious right insisting that we not eat asparagus from Chile in the fall, or strawberries in the winter? Doesn’t that make it a moral issue if it’s one of God’s laws?
August 23, 2010, 11:14 pmAnatid says:
Because the highly specific dietary laws in Western religion, found largely in Leviticus, apply only to Orthodox Jews. Judaism is a tribal religion, and only Noah’s five laws apply to Gentiles, while the 613 mitzvahs apply to Jews only. Orthodox Jews observe all of these rules. Reform Jews pick and choose, largely based on what is considered to be relevant today. For example, the mitzvah prohibiting the consumption of pork to combat trichniosis is less relevant in this day and age of refrigeration.
Christianity similarly picks and chooses which of the mitzvahs to follow and which to ignore. According to Jews, Christians don’t have to follow any of these laws. Somehow along the way, select rules that only apply to Jews got imported into Christianity, which is much more insistent about rules that apply to everyone. As it so happened, the dietary restrictions got left behind.
August 24, 2010, 1:19 amAnatid says:
Correction: Noah’s seven laws. My mistake.
August 24, 2010, 7:14 amScott says:
Most of the locavores I know are interested in building local webs of food production and distribution due to a deep-seated belief that the current fossil-fuel-based agricultural and transportation systems are inherently unsustainable, and that it’s a good idea to get a head start on alternatives. From that perspective, arguments about the relative proportion of energy used to transport food are not really relevant.
August 24, 2010, 5:00 pmTy Right says:
Sigh… Commentary from Budiansky seems fact free, and we don’t know if the man has ever grown so much as a single string bean himself…. As I wrote to his Blog” The cost of transportation is low because we subsidize it, without realizing it… Trucks cause up to 3 orders of magnitude more damage to roads than cars, but it’s car owners who pay the bulk of the costs through various taxes. Having had a farm and having actually studied agriculture (and applied mathematics), under professionals who actually know something about these topics, , I find it amazing that not one argument brought forward by Mr Budiansky and his supporters include facts and figures, but only wild unsourced statements…. People were fertilizing and manuring land millennia before using fish for any such purpose, and artificial fertilizers seem unfortunately always contaminated by small amounts of heavy metals such as cadmium, and slowly poison productive soil, and there is no way to cleanse such soil contamination. And lastly a state of nature as Budiansky seems to consider it is not in and of itself inimical to the concept of sustainable agriculture, certainly wildlife (kangaroos in Australia, and deer, rabbits, pigs, etc here) could be considered in regard to an economically viable meat source, as well as fruit and nut trees which can be planted and allowed to grow semi-wild for a few centuries while we build up decent timber once more. Current food production rests on subsidized agriculture and shipping, on the backs of low paid illegal workers, and I say that as a hunting, gun owning, conservative, ex farmer (as Mr Budiansky seems to find some fantastic virtue in being a gun owning, hunting liberal). But again, everywhere I went to school , we were forced to use facts, figures, and mathematics, but possibly that is not necessary in a liberal universe”
August 25, 2010, 12:16 amTy Right says:
Thank goodness for Anatid.. at last someone who speaks with some accuracy about Judaism, unfortunately so seldom the case.
August 25, 2010, 12:20 amTy Right says:
Spoke too soon, about Anatid, though his statemets on Hudaism were accurate. Re Watson? Let’s see, a Nobel prize winning scientist, who knows more than all the rest of us put together will ever know about genetics, and who rehabilitated a scientific institution to world wide respect, is because he utters words, quoted out of context’ all of a sudden a nut case and anti-social, because his words aren’t politically correct? Isn’t it remarkable how a scientist of great stature all of a sudden knows nothing when his remarks, based on his knowledge of science, goes against our persoanl tender political dogma. The charachter assasination of Watson, by the MSM ,and by people who know knothing of Genetics, was as stupid as it was shameful.. And yes, I have forgotten just about all the Genetics I ever learned, though I did co-author a paper in 1978 on 3rd Chromosome lethals in a population of drospohila melanogster, and was offerred a research position by Dr Nick Martin at ANU in 1980, which may prove nothing, except that I have perhaps the slightest bit more undertsanding than the next person, to honor Dr Watson’s achievements and knowledge.
August 25, 2010, 12:33 amAnatid says:
Watson was a brilliant scientist. That doesn’t mean he was a good person. I’m not sure why you think calling him a racist because of his remarks about blacks has anything to do whatsoever with his expertise with genetics. He was also hugely misogynistic, which is why Franklin refused to work with him.
Kinda like my grandfather. Brilliant man, worked on the Apollo project, did his part to land man on the moon, and it didn’t make any difference when he came home after work to beat his kids and cheat on his wife. He’s still an asshole.
We’re allowed to criticize Watson as a human being and revere him as a scientist simultaneously; I know I sure do. I just offered Mullis as an example of how it is possible to be a brilliant scientist and not simultaneously be an antisocial jerk.
Intelligence and kindness are not the same trait.
August 25, 2010, 1:30 amHarry Eagar says:
I believe it was Confucius who advised not to eat a food out of its season.
August 25, 2010, 3:17 am