I eat local to support producers.
We eat vegan at home and I'm glad it has the added benefit of lowering our carbon footprint. Next up a hybrid or electric car although ideally we'll be walking to taking transit.
http://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4389910
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My money goes further, and the product is better, and more convenient, at my local grocery store.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally at my local grocery store it is easier to avoid nonsensical "organic" claims and hogwash...
ReplyDeleteThere's those claims for sure. I'm thinking more in line of this weekend. I could by 1 pepper from Chile for half the price of peppers from BC but I bought the ones from BC
ReplyDeleteI buy the ones from Chile because they are as good, and half price.
ReplyDeleteLike I said, I do pay more to support Canadian producers.
ReplyDeleteShrug... I feel no such financial jingoism
ReplyDeleteIt's a global economy
guess I'm wealthy enough, and have enough Ag contacts, that I don't feel the same.
ReplyDeletePeople are allowed to feel differently about subjects eh. 😋
ReplyDeleteI'm a founding board member of our local food co-op. I give my support by creating/maintaining the online marketplace for our local/regional producers. I shop our farmer's markets in the summer too. Over the years I've gotten to know the farmers, and how they grow their products. But I don't buy everything (or even most things, really) locally. It's not my financial reality. But there are some products we pay more for to get from the local guys simply because we've never found it - or found a better version - elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteFor me, it's not a mission statement, it's not a lifestyle choice. It's a combination of trying to help what's left of the small farmer community and getting a great local product when I can afford to. At the end of the day, Walmart still gets most of my grocery dollars because, reality.
It's a shame the article's author is too eager to get in a smug tone of "you've been wasting your time with hippie nonsense" to understand what these studies are about, instead relegating the relevant bit to a single sentence saying it's hoped they will effect policy change. In the 1970s, corporations were funding anti-littering campaigns in an extremely successful effort to shift focus and blame off of themselves. Nowadays, they have us all scrambling to consider our personal carbon footprint while there are factories pouring out more toxins in a day than an average person does in a year.
ReplyDeleteThese studies contribute to an already sizeable body of work that finds individual choices don't do much to combat climate change. I think it's fairly well accepted fact that change needs to happen on a higher level, just as the studies confirm. For some reason, this article includes a sentence framing these folks as "critics" when, again, the authors the article is about are in perfect agreement.
These studies looked at one single measure, carbon emissions, but environmental impact is so much more than that which is why the intent is to help bolster new emissions policy, not imply that people's choices are meaningless or there is no benefit whatsoever to organic farming.
Make sure you don't charge up your electric car with power supplied from coal power plants.
ReplyDeleteEven if you charge your electric car from a coal powered plant you are still releasing less greenhouse gas per mile, or per kilometer, then you do burning gasoline.
ReplyDeleteI call bullshit because I don't think that study's methodology is sound. There is no way that eating local produce, grown with local inputs and with little or no transport involved, is going to have a bigger carbon footprint than eating conventionally. If you do a proper Scope 2 analysis and account for the fuel and chemical inputs and emissions all the way through the supply chain (including N cycles, packaging and logistical components) you'll never get factory food to compete with local producers on a carbon budget.
ReplyDeleteThen there is the elephant in the room: soil carbon. Conventional agriculture is depleting carbon in soils at a prodigious rate and has turned most productive land into carbon sources instead of sinks. Organic practices tend to build and maintain soil carbon over time.
Good works, Cass Morrison. Inspired to hear of your family's practices!
ReplyDelete+Mel V, nothing is stopping us from calling corporations out on their misdeeds and doing what we can personally. In addition, many of the studies are much more comprehensive than just looking at carbon.
ReplyDelete(Google Developers, yet another acct that wouldn't come up in name tag search).
plus.google.com - Do your part to curb climate change. Do it now! This paper shows what you can...
Cliff Bramlett As I said, my objection is with the article's disingenuous framing of what this research concluded. Two papers urging legislative action on carbon emissions doesn't in any way say organic farming is as bad or worse than CAFOs/large-scale monocropping for the environment. Again, the authors were not saying that we shouldn't try on a personal level, they are highlighting the importance of looking at the role all forms of agriculture play in creating these emissions. The article's apparent confusion is itself proof that this clarification is necessary.
ReplyDelete((Edited to add: I thought only I had this problem since I've never seen someone refer to it before but I rely on the "reply to comment" option, manually typing a username is useless. I can only reliably tag people in a post if they are already in my circles.))