The Carbon Cost From Farm To Fork

Newsweek, March, 2008

It’s the golden rule of the local-food movement: the fewer miles that food travels, the better for the environment. The only problem is, it may not be true. “Very few studies support the idea that local-food systems are greener,” says Rich Pirog of Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. When it comes to calculating the carbon cost of a certain dish, the method of transport matters as much as the distance from farm to fork. Sea-freight emissions are less than half of those associated with airplanes, trains are cleaner than trucks and a tractor-trailer can be a green machine compared with an old pickup. If you live east of Columbus, Ohio, it’s actually greener to drink French Bordeaux than wine from California, which is trucked over the Rockies, according...

Read the full article with a Free Trial at MyWire.

Premium Content Partnership | MyWire provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.