Even when you get a panel of so-called experts, there tends to be disagreements. In fact, when asked about all the controversy among what to do about the energy crisis and sustainability and alt energy Adam Werbach blurted, “First thing that we need to do is to kill all the experts,” which got a laugh but also made a good point. Lovins showed some lovin’ for her case that innovation comes with healing. In her case, she argued that investing in sustainability rather than armies would work in places like Afghanistan where she’s off to teach, not how to shoot an M-16 but of course, sustainability. Like political pundits, the talk shifted to taxes (like a carbon tax) versus subsidies. We, like most of the crowd pondered the thought of adding a “carbon tax” to various products and services. But we all know how much this country loves its taxes. But then what about subsidies? It’s no shock that dirty energy like coal and oil look relatively cheap because of the subsidies. Green foodie Michael Pollen of Omnivore’s Dilemma fame, dedicated numerous book pages talking about corn and soy subsidies, and here the group and audience did the same. That subsidized corn ends up as high fructose corn syrup in so many cheap processed foods. We don’t see any spinach subsidies. Balance the energy scale. We think that it’s time for more Green energy subsidies (not just solar). People don’t want their dirty energy taxed so we need to make clean energy cheap.

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When she wrote about this in her own blog, she wrote, in part, "The eye-opening part is that our biggest contributor to non-sustainability is our family’s food habits. More reason to work on 1) eating more fruits and vegetables, and 2) eating locally." That triggered a discussion about local food and food miles, and this is an expansion on my thoughts in that discussion.

There are many variables in food production and transportation, so there may be some foods that ship effectively. But when Michael Pollan, in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, points out that there are 10 calories of energy going into the production and transportation of every calorie of food we eat, it’s clear that the system is pretty inefficient. (There, too, it’s an average figure.)

There was an article in TreeHugger several months ago that was looking at whether it was better to get your bottled water shipped from the South Pacific or trucked from France (to the UK… it was a UK article). In terms of fuel consumed per pound of material delivered, the more local option was less efficient, because sea freight is an efficient method of transportation. (The absurdity of bottled water is its own issue, but that was the example the article was using.)

But when you are eating California produce in Michigan, you aren’t getting that brought here by ship; it’s being trucked. Even McDonalds’ beef from South American ranches may be shipped to American shores, but if you’re eating it in Michigan, it rode several hundred miles, in addition to those thousands of sea miles, to get to you.

There may be some cases where long distance efficiencies make a certain amount of sense. But by and large, eating locally is the more appropriate choice. And even if you have to pay a bit more for the local option, or if it takes a little more energy at present, it’s still a productive thing to help support the local market so that it can develop and get to the point of being the more sustainable choice all around.

An article in The Economist that was brought into the discussion pointed out that (in London, again) it was more efficient to truck in tomatoes from Spain in the winter than it was to grow them locally in heated greenhouses. Greenhouse grown food shouldn’t necessarily qualify as local food just because it wasn’t shipped thousands of miles. The issue is less the actual distance the food has traveled than it is the energy that transportation and production are requiring. Miles are an easy way to categorize it, but it’s energy, not actual miles traveled that is the real issue. It’s obvious that, if you are attempting to adopt a broadly sustainable approach to food production, then dumping huge amounts of energy into greenhouses to grow an out-of-season food is no better than shipping.

The Economist article also notes,

The term "food mile" is itself misleading, as a report published by DEFRA, Britain’s environment and farming ministry, pointed out last year. A mile travelled by a large truck full of groceries is not the same as a mile travelled by a sport-utility vehicle carrying a bag of salad. Instead, says Paul Watkiss, one of the authors of the DEFRA report, it is more helpful to think about food-vehicle miles (ie, the number of miles travelled by vehicles carrying food) and food-tonne miles (which take the tonnage being carried into account).

Some of this is weak reasoning. If the same shopper is going to the store in their SUV to buy a bag of lettuce, their contribution in the transportation scheme is equally abysmal whether they choose to buy trucked produce from thousands of miles away or a locally-grown option instead. Neither the local farmer nor the far-distant producer is making individual deliveries to stores. And even if the long-haul semi is carrying 10 times as much as the local farm truck per gallon of fuel, if the food has to go 150 miles instead of 2000, that transport efficiency doesn’t pay off.

Personally, I don’t need to eat corn-on-the-cob in January. Let that truck stay in Florida. I’ll wait for the local stuff when it’s in season, in the summertime. Shipped food also needs to be robust enough that it can withstand the rigors of transportation and distribution. Local food can often be more flavorful and enjoyable. You can find thin skinned tomatoes and tender fruit that would never stand up to shipping at a local farm stand.

Food miles may be a poor measure, but it’s probably better shorthand for food energy consumption than anything else without getting into ridiculous levels of complexity. But "local food" needs to be tempered with reasonableness. Another friend, and self-proclaimed foodie, is fond of Chinese cooking and disdains the concept of local food because he couldn’t get the ingredients for the dishes he loves from a local provider.

But eating locally does not mean only eating what is produced locally. Certainly it can be an informative exercise. Trying out the 100-Mile Diet for a month can certainly be an eye-opening experience. But, as Michael Pollan points out, only the deeply dedicated eat exclusively and continuously from their local foodshed (a term for local food production areas). Trade between foodsheds is natural and normal. It certainly isn’t only a recent innovation. Food was the focus of some of the earliest commerce in history.

A good analogy for eating locally may be found in the LEED guidelines. A building does not need to use 100% local materials to qualify for Regional Materials Use credit. If 10% of the materials used in a building come from within 500 miles of the site, that earns the project a point (and 20% Regional Materials garners an additional point). Food is much more localized than building materials, but finding and following a reasonable target for how much local food you want to eat is a much better way of accomplishing eating locally than worrying about every last mile everything took to reach your plate. This number may vary from location to location, as well as by season. In the wintertime, most northerners will eat less locally produced food than they do in the summertime. Personally, I’m going to start tracking it and see if I can reasonably eat 25% of my food from local sources.

Image Source: Michigan Dept. of Agriculture

But in addition to its recognizable forms, where the corn is recognizable as corn, there are untold numbers of additional places where we don't recognize it, but where corn forms the substance of our diet. And most of that has been highly processed.

I've been reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan recently, and it has been a very enlightening read. One of the most shocking things to discover was just how much corn is suffused throughout the typical American diet.

Pollan enlisted a scientist at Berkeley to do a breakdown of the percentage of corn in a range of McDonald's foods. They found that more than half of the content of most of the items they studied (French fries were the only exception) was corn-based: "Soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and French fries (23 percent). What in the eyes of the omnivore looks like a meal of impressive variety turns out, when viewed through the eyes of the mass spectrometer, to be a meal of a far more specialized kind of eater." These numbers seem unreasonable, until you consider that the beef and the chicken were fed a diet consisting mostly of corn, that sweeteners (particularly high fructose corn syrup), oils, and other food additives are manufactured from corn by-products.

Turning around the American diet to reduce the amount of corn we consume is not going to be an easy task. And it's not even necessarily a problem with the amount of corn that we eat as it is a problem with the way that we eat so much of the corn that we eat. Eating isn't even the only way we consume corn now. We're also putting it into our gas tanks as ethanol. In many ways, corn is emblematic of the larger issue of the industrialized, over-processed way so much of our consumption has been herded. More than anything, we need to become more enlightened about the wider effects of our consumption choices.

Corn is an energy-intensive crop to grow. It takes hundreds of pounds per acre of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to produce the glut of corn that becomes feedstock for so much of the industrialized American diet. The politics and complexities of government farm subsidies are nearly overwhelming, and certainly far beyond the scope of what I can write about here, but they are certainly a sizable part of the equation as well.

Along with trying to eat more local food and more whole food (meaning unprocessed or less-processed food, not the grocery chain), reducing the amount of corn in your diet is something to consider. From an overall green perspective, reducing your corn footprint could be one of the best things you can do. I haven't seen any hard numbers for it yet, but the advantages could be numerous. Reducing the amount of corn in your diet will help to reduce both carbon emissions and chemical pollution with farm runoff. And many of the corn by-products in food are sources of empty calories, so reducing the corn in your diet can also be a healthier step.

Cutting high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) out of your diet is going to be particularly difficult, because that sweetener has made its way into all manner of products. I started looking for bread that was not made with HFCS, and found it was a lot harder to find than I imagined. Almost all bread has HFCS high up on the ingredients list. One local store brand had a decent loaf that did not contain HFCS, but it was only sporadically available. More recently, a couple of the stores we shop at have had decent, store-label organic bread that is HFCS-free (organic HFCS is a virtual oxymoron, so organic choices are a good way to limit HFCS). But it's still in more of the foods I eat than I would like.