Sustainability calculus
Mar. 23rd, 2008 04:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trixtahA good article in the Guardian today about the fact that "food miles" is overly simplistic as a method of calculating what environmental impacts a specific food has.
What's best to eat is organic, in season, and local, of course. That's fine at the moment, but I would not be happy to return to the traditional Irish diet of mutton, potatoes, cabbages and maybe the occasional leek in the depths of winter. If I ate mutton. If the cabbages didn't require irrigation here in Oz. Or the potatoes, for that matter. Not to mention the various agricultural machinery used to grow the food.
It'd be nice to have a list of what's in season around the world, how it's farmed (bio-dynamic, organic, natural fertilisers, grass-fed, all chemicals all da time?), whether the farm workers were paid appropriate wages for their location, and whether no forests were clear-felled to provide the growing area. Until that happens (and imagine how hard it would be to collate that information and verify it), we can only do the best we can. As wimpish and imperfect as that seems - nothing is ever going to be perfect in that respect (leaving aside apocalyptic scenarios involving the removal of most of the world's population).
What's best to eat is organic, in season, and local, of course. That's fine at the moment, but I would not be happy to return to the traditional Irish diet of mutton, potatoes, cabbages and maybe the occasional leek in the depths of winter. If I ate mutton. If the cabbages didn't require irrigation here in Oz. Or the potatoes, for that matter. Not to mention the various agricultural machinery used to grow the food.
It'd be nice to have a list of what's in season around the world, how it's farmed (bio-dynamic, organic, natural fertilisers, grass-fed, all chemicals all da time?), whether the farm workers were paid appropriate wages for their location, and whether no forests were clear-felled to provide the growing area. Until that happens (and imagine how hard it would be to collate that information and verify it), we can only do the best we can. As wimpish and imperfect as that seems - nothing is ever going to be perfect in that respect (leaving aside apocalyptic scenarios involving the removal of most of the world's population).