Locavores Being Green Analysis

Locavores – Being Green or Destroying the Earth? In the article his article, “Eat local organic food if you like, but don’t kid yourself that it’s ‘green’”, James Delingpole is writing to stir up a discussion about a growing trend, “shopping local . . . to save the planet” (2010), and to present an alternative viewpoint on the subject – that eating local foods isn’t actually as green as people might like to think it is. This article was originally published in The Spectator, a weekly British popular-level magazine, and the longest one in existence there is in the UK. Delingpole is a columnist for The Spectator, with this article being one of those published columns. His audience for this column are the subscribers of the magazine, most likely …show more content…

Delingpole references “research [done] by the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)” (2010, para. 8), and while he fails to say what study it is, I was able to locate a study done by Defra covering some of the same issues discussed and with data from the year 2010, although it was released in 2012. This study seems to indicate that he cherry picked his facts somewhat. However, it is not an even comparison as they are not the same studies. While this means it should not be used to invalidate the data Delingpole cites, it does make obvious that the issue discussed requires further looking into. While he states that “consumer shopping trips accounted for 48[%] of ‘food miles’ in Britian[,] [a]ir freight amounted to less than 1[%]” (Delingpole, 2010, para. 8), and says this in the context of “if you’re worried about carbon footprints, the real menace is your car journey to the shops” (Delingpole, 2010, para. 8), the study I looked at suggested it was more complex than that, and throws some suspicion onto those numbers, though again, they cannot be discounted without seeing data that corresponds exactly with those he used. It is important to keep in mind that there is more to a carbon footprint than just basic food miles, or even basic CO2 emissions, but looking at the numbers for the CO2 emissions reveal it to be a larger and more …show more content…

. . air transport of food accounts for 12 per cent of CO2 emissions” (2012, p. 10). How much did all that sea transport account for then? 15% of CO2 emissions were from sea food kilometers. And to add to those numbers, the 29% of all CO2 emissions in the transportation of food, created by the “heavy goods vehicle[s]” (those vehicles that transport goods, and weigh in excess of three and a half tons), and the transportation of food from source to store is equal almost half of all CO2 emissions involved with food miles – or kilometers, as this is a British study (Defra: Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2012, p. 10). When you add the figures for air and sea freight with that for heavy goods vehicles, it becomes doubtful that your trip to the local farmer’s market is really the biggest deal – especially if you run any other errands while out in the car. Cars accounted for under a quarter of all emissions from food transportation, with 23%, and vans accounted for another 7%, leaving shopping trips at just over a quarter of all food transportation emissions, compared to the almost half of the total CO2 emissions accounted for by the transport from source to store (Defra: Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs,