A Radical Nerd on Food Miles

Still a radical many decades after the events described in the previous blog post, I examined the roots of locavorism and food miles.  Locavores tell themselves that eating local means fresher, healthier, and tastier food, but couldn’t local food rot before it’s sold?  They feel they’re supporting their local economy, but aren’t people who live somewhere else just as good as locals?  They believe they’re increasing food security, but what if local crops fail and there’s no way to import food?   They enjoy the drive out to the country to meet their personal farmer. Locavores claim buying local food uses less energy because the food doesn’t travel as far.
        On the surface, the last claim, food miles, sounds plausible.  It follows that imported food would cost more if the added cost of transport is factored in, but I recalled that local food often costs more than imported.  I suspected that carrying tons of food for many families in one big eighteen-wheeler truck to a supermarket was probably as efficient as carrying pounds of food for a few families in a pickup to a farmer’s market, even though the semi got worse mileage and traveled farther.
Being a nerd, I did the math.  First, I checked the internet for reasonable numbers to assign to the distances traveled, the mileages of the vehicles, and the amount of food carried per trip in the pickup versus the semi.  Then I calculated how much gasoline it would take to move a pound of food in each vehicle – the truly relevant statistic rather than how far the food travels.  I converted the answer to tablespoons, easier to visualize than decimal fractions of a gallon. No higher math required, just multiplication and division.
  Let’s assume the pickup transports 500 pounds of food on each trip.  It gets 15 mpg and travels 50 miles on each trip from farm to farmers’ market, so 50mi/15mpg = 3.33 gallons gasoline is used per trip in the pickup.  If each trip moves 500 pounds of food, 3.33gal/500lbs  = 0.00667 gallons to move each pound of food in the pickup, which is equivalent to 1.7 tablespoons of gasoline.  [.00667 gallons x 256 T/gal  = 1.7 T]
We can do a similar calculation for a big semi food truck.  It gets only about 4 mpg, but it can carry 50,000 pounds of food.  Let’s assume the truck travels 1500 miles, the oft quoted distance from farm to fork.  So, 1500mi/4mpg = 375 gallons per trip.  Divide 375gal by 50,000lbs and you get 0.0075 gallons of gas per pound of food.  And, 0.0075 gallons = 1.9 tablespoons of gasoline, about 5/8 teaspoon of gasoline more than the pickup.
Guess what?  The Sierra Club magazine agrees with me.  The August 2008 “Ask Mr Green” column says, “A locavore's transportation footprint can actually be comparatively large, depending on loads and vehicles. Hauling 500 pounds of cabbage 50 miles in a small pickup, for instance, can burn about the same amount of fuel per pound of cargo as trucking 50,000 pounds 1,500 miles in an 18-wheeler. Plus, if the semi backhauls food, then it can be twice as efficient as a pickup that's returning empty or partially full.”
http://sierraclub.typepad.com/greenlife/2012/08/ask-mr-green-local-vs-organic.html  
However, the family who drives 50 miles in their Prius (50 mpg) to meet their farmer uses more than five tablespoons of gasoline per pound of food if they carry back fifty pounds of food for the week.  50mi/50mpg = 1gal gas per trip.  1gal/50lbs = 0.02 gal x 256T/gal = 5.12 T.
If you can’t do the math, you can be fooled by false claims.  The food miles fallacy is a perfect example of something that’s plausible but not true.  When your teacher explained word problems, even though your eyes were glazing over, she had your best interests at heart.

Becoming Radical

One morning when I was about nine, I was going on errands with my father in our new 1948 Packard.  My father pushed a knob on the dashboard that soon popped out with its tip glowing red hot and touched it to his cigarette.  He turned to me in his “I’m-right-so-don’t-argue” voice:  “People like Bernice who live in public housing projects shouldn’t be allowed to vote!”
“What?” I said, “How come?”   Bernice was our “colored” cleaning woman.  I loved her.
“Because they don’t own property and so they don’t have a stake in running the country.”  He stubbed out his cigarette in the little drawer that served as an ashtray.
I knew something was wrong with my father’s logic.  I stroked the grey-beige plush seat covering with my fingers.  Bernice worked and paid taxes in our country, didn’t she?  Shouldn’t she have as many rights as anyone else?   I knew I couldn’t convince my father he was mistaken, but I resolved to study hard so when I grew up I would have a comeback.  I would be on the side of people like Bernice.  People whom my father dubbed “The Great Unwashed.”
You can see that from an early age, I didn’t believe everything I was told.  I was a radical, one who looks at the roots of things.  In middle age, I became a Unitarian Universalist, hoping to continue as a radical with like-minded people.