Dec 10 2007

Local v. Industrial foods: More sponsored science?

The business section of Sunday’s New York Times reports counterintuitive research suggesting that locally grown foods may have a higher carbon footprint than foods transported from long distances. CSPI’s Integrity in Science project says the source of the research, University of California Davis’ program on sustainable agriculture gets industry funding, including a $250,000 grant from Campbell Soup. It’s not that food companies buy the research results they want. It’s just that groups that take industry money are more likely to come up with research favorable to the sponsor’s interests. Just a coincidence, I guess.

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  • Fentry
  • December 13, 2007
  • 12:42 am

Three responses off-the-cuff may contextualize these findings a bit: 1. The first is that no one way of sourcing food is the magic bullet for all of the problems surrounding farms, nutrition, food security and the environment.

2. Eating locally represents a paradigm shift which calls for people to ask these questions and help change food systems. Even though eating locally is not today always more carbon-efficient, these questions don’t really get asked when the paradigm is global and corporate.

3. I think there’s a ramping-up point. Until the eating local movement is of a sufficient size, a lot of carbon efficiency won’t be realized–for instance if a local farmer has to use a far-off abattoir–or if one has to use several stores to find all of one’s groceries. But these efficiencies would probably increase if the movement were larger. “Sourcing” is not a static system.

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