Local Food and Carbon Footprint

In recent days, local-food movement gains an increasing popularity among citizens. The It’s components claim that food grown close to home can reduce the global warming. Because comparing with the conventionally produced food, local food need less fossil fuels for transportation which helps to cut down greenhouse gas. Personally speaking, I disagree with the idea that “eating local food lowers my carbon footprint”. And I’ll explore my opinion as follows.

On one hand, it seems that the definition of local has not be universally formulated. How local is local? You may say within a 50-mile radius is local. However, this distance can be short enough that it cannot cover a province or state, such as in China or long enough to cross an entire country, such as in some small European nations. Thus we are just unable to figure out a widely accepted standard to define “local”. It is meaningless to discuss whether the food is local or not.

On the other hand, I think the distance of transportation is not the only or even the most significant factor that we should take into consideration when evaluating carbon footprint of food. A research once analyzed greenhouse gas emissions of production, transportation and distribution of food. And the study showed that the transportation, in fact, only took up 11% of the food’s greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, it accounts for only 4% to deliver the product from producer to the market. In that case, chances are that we stress overmuch importance on the transportation of food.

In conclusion, I insist eating local food has nothing to do with lowing carbon footprint.