Steve Savage has written a very interesting analysis, complete with very helpful charts and tables and such, explaining clearly Why Most Food Could Never Be “Local”. This should scare the hell out of anyone aware of peak oil concerns and everyone who likes to eat. Let me briefly and grossly oversimplify Steve’s analysis:
- Most areas cannot grow everything locally; this applies not only to avocados and oranges, which require a certain climate, but also to wheat and many other crops for various reasons. (Read Steve’s article.)
Let me add the peak oil problem:
- Given that much food cannot be grown locally, an advanced transportation system is required to bring prairie wheat, Florida oranges, and California-everything-else to New York.
- Our entire transportation system runs on oil. All of it. We have no electric trains or trucks, no hydrogen-powered tractors and combines.
- Given that we appear to be in or very near peak oil, how exactly is food getting from farm to table?
Some will say, No problem, as the price of oil goes up alternative transportation methods will be devised. I say, How’s that working so far? The price of oil has gone up, considerably, including a very worrisome spike last year to $147 per barrel, and still no push to rebuild the rail system, no serious effort to figure out how to move essentials like food without diesel-powered trucks.
Perhaps the price of oil has not gone up enough? The price per barrel is now somewhere north of USD $80; it was around $20 only a few years ago. If a quadrupling isn’t enough incentive, what will be?
The problem is that so many government subsidies to so many things are masking the price of oil, from the U.S. military presence in the Middle East to Canadian subsides to the tar sands (CDN$ 1.6B per year) to ‘free’ roads for trucks to roll on…and so on. Farmers get subsidies, too, of course. This is ridiculous because they are providing something we all need, so of all people farmers should be able to make a handsome living without tax dollar support. And no doubt farm subsidies will increase as oil prices increase, in order to keep food costs down.
However, these subsidies reduce the perceived need to get our transportation system off oil, so we just keep digging ourselves in deeper until the government no longer can or will provide enough subsidy to keep food prices low.
Then people will rapidly discover that de-carbonising the transportation system will take a great deal of money, energy, and time. And during all that time, food prices are going to jump, meaning less money in the economy for everything else, what with food being a necessity and all, meaning a recession.
What this means for the 100-mile diet, and therefore everyone’s diet
Steve’s findings plus very costly transportation means the 100-mile diet is going to become the norm, because once transportation costs become a factor, the more oil required to bring food to you, the higher the price of that food. And right now, we have a very inefficient transportation system.
To be realistic, 100-milers should be pushing hard to restore our rail system and upgrade it to electric. If we do that, then we can easily enough ship fruits and vegetables around North America. Rather than airfreighting tomatoes from California to Ontario in the winter, we can put them on high-speed electric train.
If we don’t do that, if people can only eat what grows locally (unless they’re wealthy), then everyone’s dietary choices are going to get a lot more limited.
What this means for vegetarians
Many vegetarians are so for compassionate reasons; they don’t want to contribute to the suffering of animals. Others are vegetarians to reduce their impact on the planet, as raising beef, for example, requires ten times as much land and vastly more energy than growing the equivalent amount of calories in vegetables. These are two of the primary reasons people go veg.
However, those of us who are vegetarian recognise that it is a choice, and that choice is going to get much more difficult for people in cold climates. It is much easier to grow hay and feed it to a cow during the winter – and slaughter the cow when needed – than to grow tomatoes in January in Alberta.
It is possible we could grow them in solar greenhouses, and I am part of a group designing a solar greenhouse for market, but realistically we’re a long way from greenhouse tomatoes in Alberta. Without an affordable transportation system between the warmer parts of the country/continent and the colder parts, it’s going to get much more difficult to be vegetarian in the latter.
So, guess who else should be pushing hard to rebuild and electrify the rail system….
Suggested books if you want to learn more
The books below discuss in much more detail some of the ideas mentioned in this post.
The first book (from left-to-right) is Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet
Call me naive, but I never knew that flour would be struck from our 100-Mile Diet. Wheat products are just so ubiquitous, “the staff of life,” that I had hazily imagined the stuff must be grown everywhere. But of course: I had never seen a field of wheat anywhere close to Vancouver, and my mental images of late-afternoon light falling on golden fields of grain were all from my childhood on the Canadian prairies. What I was able to find was Anita’s Organic Grain & Flour Mill, about 60 miles up the Fraser River valley. I called, and learned that Anita’s nearest grain suppliers were at least 800 miles away by road. She sounded sorry for me. Would it be a year until I tasted a pie?
The next book is James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
The next two books are growing your own vegetables year-round in a solar greenhouse, something we might all want to look into. 
The second also has “recipes for soaps, teas and things like that which can be made from greenhouse-grown items” which sounds fun.
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[...] The next final book describes the outcome of an experiment that took off and became wildy popular: The 100-mile diet. The authors attempted to live only on foods grown within 100 miles of their home. They were motivated by concerns about climate change, but in reality peak oil is going to strike first and make the 100-mile diet a necessity rather than an option. (I discussed some serious concerns about this even being possible today in Why Most Food Could Never Be “Local” – What this means in a peak oil world to your food choice….) [...]
I agree with the spirit of the post, even before clicking the link to the “very helpful charts and tables and such”. But you are not seeing everything that is happening. We are lucky in the US because Barack and Michelle Obama believe in locally grown food, in quality food supplies, and in fighting obesity (they all go hand in hand). When have you ever heard food sustainability being discussed by a president prior to the current administration? You could not ask for a more influential office in the US Democracy.
Yes, you have a point about oil, we get that! The people who come to your site come here because they know that you have an understanding of oil and its impact on our daily lives. But the big picture is that change is occurring, and in a democracy, change does not happen from the top down, it occurs from the bottom up. Give this momentum a chance, research the issues, provide links to grass roots orgs and White House docs, and then become a voice for change. Right now, it seems like all you care about is providing a doom and gloom scenario without any objective (or subjective) way for readers to be heard outside of this forum. For a former political candidate, that doesn’t sound like leading. It sounds like Glen Beck.
BTW, Interesting that the link “two of the primary reasons people go veg” redirects to a page on your website that is “The 4 reasons people go vegetarian”. Did you ever think that people are vegetarians because it just tastes better? That’s why I don’t eat meat.
Thanks for the thoughtful response, pa. Most of the articles tend to be somewhat gloomy because that’s the reality we face on our current path. I am working away on The Way Home, which provides a sustainable society as an alternative. I also occasionally post solutions, or things individuals and small communities can do to prepare.
Leadership will have to come from the grassroots, I entirely agree. Too much rot at the top, and we need neighbour-convincing-neighbour rather than someone at the top simply ordering.
I had a good laugh when I read that Canada subsidizes the Alberta tar sands to the tune of $1.68 per year!
I guess that 8-looking B stands for billions of dollars, eh?
Something to keep in mind is that we shouldn’t be comparing a steer to tomatoes in winter. We should be comparing a steer to dried beans in winter — and beans are something that we can grow here in western Canada. Indeed, as you say, people might have to stop eating what they can’t grow themselves without huge inputs of energy and carbon-based fertilizers.
A lovely look at eating what’s in season is Barbara Kingsolvers’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
BTW, my students grow organic Canadian red fife wheat and we make pizzas from the wheat that they sow, tend, harvest (with kindergarten scissors!), thresh and mill themselves. Best pizza you’ll ever eat! There’s a picture of my students starting their pizza garden at
http://www.greenhearted.org/school-gardens.html.
I suspect that literacy is now overemphasized as the focus of our schools. All students and all teachers should be focusing their learning on food growing. When climate change meets peak oil, look out!
When looking at the issue superficially it would appear that eating all foods from a 100 mile radius would help answer both nutritional concerns and energy concerns.
Aside from the obvious such as a resident of northern Alberta would never have fruit to eat nor fresh vegetables in off-seasons, those who advocate or suggest that society can grow all its food locally fail to understand the economics, and concepts such as relative competitive advantage.
To begin with large mono culture operations, though not good for the environment, do translate into highly efficient (in terms of money an energy) operations-so much so that locally grown vegetable and fruit cannot compete on either cost or energy terms. True, moving produce a few thousand miles has a cost, but the cost per pound of produce becomes insignificant when compared to other input costs. This of course, assumes that Alberta or some other jurisdiction could actually grow its bananas, shrimp, oysters, and other foods that do not spring up naturally in that environment.
People often complain about free roads, and other subsidies. I agree that we should probably use subsidies to encourage more green technology, but when people state the roads cost nothing to the trucking industry or select a relatively small figure, $1.6 billion, which sounds large, they really need to check their facts.
For example, most jurisdictions in North America have heavy gasoline taxes, and those taxes, paid by the trucking industry, more than pay for the roads they use. The subsidy to the oil industry sounds large, but when one looks at the production, revenues, and costs, it becomes a drop in the oil bucket-a rounding error in the government’s books.
I came across your citation of my blog post about Local. The more I think about it, one of the best options for nutritious fruits and vegetables in cold regions is actually frozen. Peas, sweet corn, berries, and many vegetables are actually really tasty and nutritious frozen and when you compare the cost in energy and carbon to trying to deliver fresh produce from distant places, they make a lot of sense. Anyway, this seems like a thoughtful blog trying to wrestle with complex but important issues
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