Is Eating Locally Really More Sustainable?

When the U.S. economy and society abruptly shut down in March 2020 due to a global pandemic, food shortages were common as supply chains temporarily collapsed.  For example, most of the beef and pork sold in the U.S. is processed in just a handful of huge plants. When a Covid-19 outbreak shut one or two of them down, retail outlets quickly ran out of meat. A shortage of long-haul truckers made things worse.

Food manufacturers and distributors recovered remarkably quickly, implementing effective safety protocols that allowed them to restore and maintain a highly functional food distribution system throughout the pandemic.  However, the early days of the pandemic revealed a suprising vulnerability in our food supply network.

The U.S. is a large country, both in population and in territory. And yet our food system is highly centralized.  It's also highly efficient, which makes our food costs among the lowest in the industrialized world. One way the food industry boosts efficiency is through various agricultural technologies that increase the yield or output of every square acre that we farm.  Another is economy of scale.  It is more cost effective for one farmer or company to farm 1,000 acres than it is for 10 farmers to farm 100 acres each.

The American food system is highly centralized. It's also highly efficient, which makes our food costs among the lowest in the industrialized world.

Another way that we keep costs down is by reducing redundancies in the networks that supply, transport, and sell our food to us.  But another word for redundancy is "back up."  When a system has no redundancies, the entire system becomes only as strong as its weakest link. 

Eating local by necessity

When our national food systems broke down temporarily, many people sought out new relationships with local growers and supplies.  Participation in Community Sponsored Agriculture -- where people buy shares in small local farms in exchange for a weekly box of whatever's being harvested -- shot up.  Small farmers and wholesale vendors quickly set up programs to deliver meat, dairy, and produce directly to consumer's doorsteps.  A local food economy sprang to life. 

One of the lessons that many people drew from the pandemic was that a less centralized food supply and delivery system would be more resilient when things go awry -- and that the benefits of some redundancy would outweigh the costs of reduced efficiency. But while the local food movement may have gotten a big boost from the coronavirus crisis, it's been around for a long time.  And one of the chief articles of faith among "locavores," is that eating local reduces the carbon footprint of our consumption and...

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