Eating Fresh Papaya In Sweden:The Locavore Movement Needs Legs To Stand On
By Erin Gallagher
Filed Under Conscious Commerce, The Big Picture |
Along with the words cougar, cloudware, mumblecore and upcycling, locavore made the new Oxford American Dictionary’s list of new words last year. For those playing the home game, a locavore is a person who chooses to only eat food that is grown locally.
Restaurants everywhere are adding locally grown, organic dishes to their menus, farmers markets have spouted up in many cities across the world and in 2007, American schools in over 35 states presented students with locally grown produce for lunch in their cafeterias. It has been decided: eating foods grown within a 100-mile radius of your kitchen is a sure-fire way to ensure that spiking gas prices have less impact on your wallet and allows you tighter control over how many pounds of pesticides you ingest. Great. So grab a trowel, some native plants, create an edible forest in your neighborhood and responsibly choose produce you do not grow from (organic) farms in the region.
Aside from the solidified knowledge about the “locavore movement” and eating locally however, issues over policy and political discrepancies due to the pull of the hefty food conglomerates remain out of the spotlight. It is these junctures that we must address first; as even if there is significant demand from the public, the Government does (as is widely known) have an affinity for constantly high cash flow.
First, the surviving out-of-date policies regarding transport of food must be addressed. Under a little-known international treaty called the Convention on International Civil Aviation, signed in Chicago in 1944 to help the fledgling airline industry, fuel for international travel and transport of goods, including food, is exempt from taxes, unlike trucks, cars and buses. There is also no tax on the fuel consumed by ocean freighters.
Europe is primed for abolition. This year the European Commission in Brussels announced that all freight-carrying flights into and out of the European Union would be included in the bloc’s emissions-trading program by 2012, meaning permits will have to be purchased for the pollution they generate. Being the world’s leading food importer, the EU’s import volume has increased 20 percent in the last five years.
The commission is also negotiating with the International Maritime Organization over various alternatives to reduce greenhouse gases. If there is no solution by year’s end, sea freight will also be included in Europe’s emissions-trading program, said Barbara Helferrich, a spokeswoman for the European Commission’s Environment Directorate. “We’re really ready to have everyone reduce — or pay in some way”.
The value of fresh fruit and vegetables imported by the United States, in second place, nearly doubled from 2000 to 2006. Unlike the EU, there have been no public statements of any plans to reduce incentives for air or sea freight regarding the transportation of food.
Acknowledgment of a value for the damage that mass transport of food costs the environment is the second step toward making the locavore movement a functional global practice.
We’re shifting goods around the world in a way that looks really bizarre,” said Paul Watkiss, an Oxford University economist who wrote a recent European Union report on food imports. He noted that Britain, for example, imports — and exports — 15,000 tons of waffles a year, and similarly exchanges 20 tons of bottled water with Australia. More importantly, Mr. Watkiss said, “we are not paying the environmental cost of all that travel.”
In the book Natural Capitalism by Amory and Hunter Lovins, the concept of placing a value on the environment is introduced as a critical base from which to measure any damage we are causing. Once we can place a number on our negative impacts we can set a goal to lower this until we reach net zero. Carbon (measured in Tonnes) is the only benchmark the average food shopper has for balancing one producer or food type against another. This is an insufficient, intangible and grossly deceptive measurement of what negative impact each food actually has on the world. Who can approximate what impact a Ton of carbon has on the environment? That would be a starting point.
Organizations such as Slow Food International, Local Food Works in the UK, Edible Communities in Portland , Oregon and FoodRoutes are working to spread the seeds of change through knowledge and action. As with any movement that has lasting effects in a positive way, the clambering of a dedicated group of people will eventually push the legal and political bodies to create the necessary shifts in policy to enable a just, relevant and healthy system to function.
Looking into resources to dive in deeper?
- Check out the list on the Animal Vegetable Miracle website
Posted on September 12, 2008 |
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Enjoyed the read
Any recommendations on a balanced diet in the frozen North?
Wow, enlightening article - I just wish the American waffles were as good as the British.