Yes, buying local food is a climate solution.
It seems reasonable. We know that climate is changing because human activities are emitting too much carbon into the atmosphere. So the solution is to take steps to reduce those emissions. Since our food systems happen to be a major emitter, to the tune of roughly a quarter of all global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, changing what we eat seems an obvious point of intervention. If each of us simply reduces the carbon footprint of our own diets by eating foods that produce fewer carbon emissions in their production — swapping out legumes for meat, for example — emissions will drop. Right?
And the corollary must also be true: the last thing we’d want to do is something like eating local, when that doesn’t appear to offer any immediate GHG savings.
Right?
Unfortunately, no. These sentiments are appreciable but misleading. Climate change isn’t just a problem of lots of people all doing something good for themselves but bad for the planet — eating meat, for example. Emissions may be the direct, or proximate, cause of climate change, but those emissions are themselves a byproduct of a network of extractive and oppressive industries built and maintained by a small set of powerful bad actors.
Don’t get me wrong. Eating less meat is great advice for myriad reasons and can be a critical part of how we push for transformative change. But as I’ll explain below, counting carbon in our grocery cart is not a very effective lever for achieving the widespread systemic changes we’d need to achieve to actually bring emissions down quickly.
On this topic, Project Drawdown’s Jon Foley, recently posted the following on Threads when reposting an essay by Hannah Richie debating the merits of food miles and buying local,
“Eating local” is *not* a climate solution. We need better food — food that doesn’t cause deforestation, massive methane emissions, and big emissions of nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide from poorly managed soils.
But food doesn’t cause deforestation, or methane emissions, or soil degradation. People do. And not all people, but a relatively small group of people — people at the helm of large-scale agribusiness firms who both hold and exercise the power to coerce both industry and government policy in a direction that favours their business models and bottom line. Decisions about what technologies to use, what markets to cultivate, what land to acquire and transform, or what levels of animal abuse to tolerate, happen entirely behind the veil and far from the influence of the consumer.
People often incorrectly think that our food systems are built as they are out of necessity — their current form reflects the realities of feeding billions of people. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Our food systems, in which I include everything from specific technologies to government subsidies, trade agreements, and intellectual property laws, are specifically designed to be systems of wealth extraction, consolidation, and control. Food is just the leverage.
Even if a major segment of the US consumer base stopped buying red meat, en masse, this wouldn’t immediately translate into a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Firstly, the carbon emissions of the food we buy (and the food we pass by) have already been emitted. The food has already been produced. The feed corn has already been grown, processed, and transported. The cows have already burped. The meat has already been processed and packaged and transported to your local store. So, emissions don’t change at all, at least not immediately. Oh, and any meat that goes unsold? It will end up in a landfill, where it will release methane as it decomposes.
Emissions are also unlikely to drop in the following years. Livestock price insurance, which is a new but rapidly expanding kind of insurance coverage, will protect some farmers from any losses in the short term and will no doubt continue to become more common. Meat companies also aren’t just going to sit back and take the hit. They will shift how they market red meat, changing prices and products to target other market segments such as lower-income households who do not have the economic flexibility to forego affordable, high-quality protein even if it is bad for the environment. And firms will no doubt turn more to export markets; demand for meat protein is growing in China, for example.
Even if we are being optimistic and assume for the moment that herd sizes in the US will decrease significantly in response to a drop in demand for beef products in US markets, there is similarly no reason to expect that the firms and farmers producing the feed crops those cows eat, like corn and soy, will themselves slow down their production. There are too many other things they can do with these crops.
This is the elephant in the room. Agribusiness is not actually in the business of producing food. They’re in the business of developing land to produce products that can hold and grow wealth. Yes, food is part of that. But so are biofuels and bioplastics. In fact, less than 40% of land in production globally is producing food that people eat. The rest goes to a mix of animal feeds, biofuels, textiles, pharmaceuticals, products like soap or alcohol, or is exported to other countries where its fate is difficult to track.
These firms are incredibly good at moving their product and adapting it to ensure continued long-term economic growth despite the vagaries of consumer demand. The notion that they will just passively accept the substantial imposed de-growth of their industry because one market segment of consumers is concerned about climate change, is absurd. As long as they retain the social license to pursue growth at all costs, they will find other uses and markets, and the deforestation, land conversion, and GHG emissions will continue.
If you need an example, look no further than the tactics of the fossil industry. It is well documented that they have no interest in degrowing their petrochemical interests and are actively cultivating plastics as a new venue for growth in the case that fuel markets eventually erode.
This industry has a particularly pernicious history of using anti-competitive and hegemonic strategies, under a rhetoric of feeding the world, to meet its goals of endless growth and control. United Fruit Company, one of the oldest firms in the industry, has a history that is replete with atrocities involving political corruption and anti-socialist coups, government-aided land theft, and worker exploitation, all in the purported name of food security. Modern agrifood and agrichemical companies have more recently used a variety of complex anticompetitive tactics to lock producers and consumers into a treadmill of dependence on their products and technologies. And through lobbying, agribusiness has propped itself up with endless subsidies of cash and political will and social, environmental, and human capital.
The upshot here is that we have largely lost control over what we eat, and have even less control over how what we eat is produced. The modern industrial agribusiness regime is not something we can reform by buying a different set of products from the same sellers. It is a system we must replace piece by piece. That means disruption and secession, which has all along been the ethos of the alternative food movement. Food miles do matter, but they were turned into a straw man by the movement’s critics, as if the only thing the movement was about was how far our food travels.
Local and alternative food movements have always been first and foremost about a reorientation of values; a project to emancipate and re-empower people and the land. They hold promise not necessarily because food moves smaller distances but because they help us reconnect to the people and places where our food comes from. They allow us to build new relationships. They allow us to build trust. And they empower us to regain some agency within the food system beyond the purported power of the dollars in our pocket.
So, yes, local food is absolutely a climate solution. As is buying from cooperatives, or B Corporations like Riverside Foods, or supply chain innovators like Skipper Otto. These business models are not driven by the relentless pursuit of growth and wealth but by building more trustworthy supply chains and producing food in a way that engenders ethical and just relationships between people and among people and nature. These foods may not presently have lower carbon footprints than other foods that we might choose today or tomorrow or next week but buying them is an act of secession and disruption that moves us toward an entirely new system in which the relationship between food production and carbon emissions is itself entirely transformed.
