Saturday, October 16, 2010

On World Food Day: Desrochers and Shimizu on the Local Food Activist's Dilemma

Today is World Food Day. In reference to this year's theme "United Against Hunger" Pierre Desrochers and Hiroku Shimizu have written an excellent blog post documenting the problems associated with the "food miles" fetish of many locavores. They write:
. . .in a world where no good deed goes unpunished, the individuals most responsible for producing ever-growing amounts of food at ever more affordable prices – from large scale farmers, professional plant breeders, synthetic pesticide and fertilizer manufacturers to agricultural equipment manufacturers, commodity traders, logistics industry workers and packaging manufacturers – have increasingly been demonized as poor stewards of the Earth, if not outright public health threats.
I've written about this before and am happy to see I am in agreement with these experts who have written extensively on this topic.

2 comments:

  1. The New York Times also had an op-ed about this a while back. Math Lessons for Locavores

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  2. You are right and it is very good. I link to it in my previous post.

    http://foundationsofecon.blogspot.com/2010/09/eat-locally-save-globally.html

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