Eating local is expensive and time-consuming, which is why this consumerist movement will not easily trickle down into mass society.
And it's bad for the environment too based on the studies Superfreakonomics quoted. Why? It turns out transportation is a minor contributor to food related emissions:
Transportation represents only 11 percent of food emissions, with delivery from producer to retailer representing only 4 percent.
You need the book to go into full detail but the crux of it is that large, optimized farms are significantly less destructive to the environment on a proportional basis than small, local farms. The people behind the study said that cutting out one meal of red meat and dairy per week would have a better result than eating entirely locally produced food.
This is not true. The book you cite, 'SuperFreakonomics,' by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, apparently misquotes the original research on which they base their claim. Here's a quote from the book[1]:
"Even the 'locavore' movement, which encourages people to eat locally grown food, doesn't help in this regard. A recent study by two Carnegie Mellon researchers, Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews, found that buying locally produced food actually increases greenhouse-gas emissions."
But compare that to how one of the two authors of the original study, Christoph Weber, actually summarizes their findings[2]:
"The point of the paper was to say that yes, you can lower your footprint by eating local foods, but you can do more on average by eating differently. It’s not that eating local is a crock."
In that light, it seems as if Levitt and Dubner either misunderstood the paper by Weber and Matthews or preferred to portrait it in a light that helps make their own book look profound and surprising.
Red meat certainly takes a lot of energy to produce, and may well be environmentally beneficial to cut it from your diet if that's your thing. Personally I stay away from beef because my genes have decided that I have more than enough iron, thank-you-very-much.
However, there's surely some benefit from growing food in your own backyard - you do cut down on the (admittedly minimal transport costs), and doing something physical outside has got to be good for you - even if it is a few pots outside if you live in a high-rise. Here's hoping you don't cut your finger off doing so.
I associate "localvore" with "farmer's market," not with "vegetable garden." Vegetable gardens sound unambiguously good to me, whereas 50 pickup trucks making 50mi trips to a farmer's market might be worse than 1 semi truck making a 500mi trip to the grocery store.
Its time consuming. Thats exactly why I don't grow my own things. Its a hobby within it self. If I had to grow my own food, then I would not have time for other things in my life.
Now imagine everyone not having time for other things in their life. We would be a much LESS productive society..
People who cite local food as being good in and of itself are likely to value it because they feel it'll help the local economy. If someone is truly interested in sustainability, then they'll rank food sources for sustainability, not proximity.
Small, local farms are, however, more likely to use sustainable methods, and people sometimes think that means that local == sustainable.
And it's bad for the environment too based on the studies Superfreakonomics quoted. Why? It turns out transportation is a minor contributor to food related emissions:
Transportation represents only 11 percent of food emissions, with delivery from producer to retailer representing only 4 percent.
You need the book to go into full detail but the crux of it is that large, optimized farms are significantly less destructive to the environment on a proportional basis than small, local farms. The people behind the study said that cutting out one meal of red meat and dairy per week would have a better result than eating entirely locally produced food.
Some quotes here: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Books/superfreakonomics-read-exce...