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Comment by gsky | Hacker News Reader

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Food transportation is NOT a big contributor to global warming. Bulk transportation, especially with ships is one of the most efficient ways of moving things around the globe. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

A quote from that article "Transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%."

Yes, so the transportation of food is a small portion of the greenhouse emissions involved with producing that food.

Trying to grow food locally with lower economies of scale may in turn result in higher emissions. In any case, it's not going to massively lower emissions.

This - as most of this thread - reads like some well-crafted well put-together propaganda coming straight from some Paul R. Ehrlich type talking head of a person. Even if I would trust the data you provided, there is still the monoculture vs polycultlure in relation to fertilizer usage, job market, food security, microclimate aspects - each of which would require a separate thread. There is a whole socioeconomic ecosystem build around local farming, most post-communist countries had world-class agri systems in place before it was taken apart after 1989 (with local fertilizer production due to local beef production).

> most post-communist countries had world-class agri systems in place

citation needed

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Communist_Czech...

Not advocating for some 7year-planning nightmare, this is solely related to the local vs globalized production aspect of this chaotic discussion

Globalization of food has been one of the key drivers preventing famines from occurring.

Technically, preventing famines harms the environment in the “best way to not produce carbon is to die” sense, although I don’t think this was what the poster meant originally!

Globalization of food is primarily about control, for the sake of humanity always check the history, motives of people you consume literature from

Ocean shipping is really efficient. Local farmers market food can easily result in more CO2 emissions than shipping from another country. 20 miles in a pickup truck is worse than 2,000 miles by massive cargo ship.

This is why carbon taxes are so efficient, they optimize for actual emissions vs what people think are the problems.

Last mile delivery is necessary even for imported food.

If we are comparing farmers markets to grocery stores, last mile delivery to grocery stores is in semi trucks filled with a range of products not half full pickup trucks. The difference in CO2/mile is again huge. As to picking up from each, people driving out of their way to farmers markets are generally worse for the environment than any potential savings from “local” production.

PS: Home delivery often beats driving to stores because of more efficient routing, but that’s very dependent on the specifics.

Well, local foods has the last mile delivery problem for every single part of the journey since none of it can be made efficient.

last mile delivery is necessary for local food too and local food is typically more emission heavy per unit

In what world is local food typically more emission heavy than imported food?

This one. For example, imported New Zealand lamb is significantly less carbon intensive than Welsh lamb (when consumed in the UK), because of country size and climate.

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/nz-lambs-bette...

That is one cherry picked example... And it is an odd situation to have picked. The colony that has yet to have its nutrients extracted and exported requires less fertilizers. Who knew /s.

It's the example I know off the top of my head, because I'm from a Welsh farming town. Is that really so surprising? Transport is _incredibly_ efficient nowadays, it's completely expected that a better climate trumps transportation costs.

Hardly, it’s cherry picked in the other direction to favor local production due to the extreme distances involved. Compare veggies grown in Spain and shipped to London and the advantage is even later, but the distances are less impressive.

You're still taking a London centric view, which is very odd.

The context is India, remember. One of England's former colonies.

The study was comparing food consumed in the UK not India. It wasn’t suggesting producing apples/milk/lamb in New Zealand was the best option, just that it was more environmentally friendly for people in the UK to eat an Apple from New Zealand than that which was produced locally. Clearly there’s other options for imports that aren’t literally from the opposite side of the planet. (https://www.geodatos.net/en/antipodes/united-kingdom/london)

> concluded that lamb imported from New Zealand is four times as energy efficient as lamb reared in the UK, even when carbon emissions from the transport process are taken into account.”

> The report shows apples and dairy products also have a smaller carbon footprint – half the size, in the case of dairy – when they are imported from New Zealand rather than UK-sourced.

> Professor Caroline Saunders, who led the research, said, “Food that has travelled long distances is perceived as being harmful to the environment and has some media attention in our key markets, especially Europe.

What? Why does any of that matter?

In a world where economies to scale in large production reasons = less GHG/per cultivated and the typical person involved in the production of the food has a much lower carbon footprint necessary to sustain their life.

It depends on the local and the food as well.

You either transport the food or you transport the fertilizer, heavy equipment, water, and other inputs necessary to grow the food. And often to places that aren't well suited to it.

Something's gonna have to be transported one way or another. Or we can just decide everyone will need to have blander and less varied diets. That will bring the amount of stuff to transport down, but you're still probably going to be more efficient having the inputs in a few places that can grow food really well and exporting it to the places that can't.

Countries like Singapore would probably have big problem with that, and a lot of African countries.

This is where electric everything makes sense. Yes a lot of resources are used to transport food, but today we're not at all dependent on a good harvest season for not starving.

The last 100 years have been pretty much the only time in history where food in many parts of the world was guaranteed. Regardless of growing seasons.

I think long term vertical farming is going to revolutionize food, but until then efficient global shipment will be the way to go.

You could do much more by cutting out meat than by eating local

I'm not sure the Sam Kinison approach scales. We need cheaper cleaner energy. Growing food locally just shuffles the variables around for marginal emissions benefit with massive hits to scalability.

You don't even get a marginal emissions benefit. When you grow crops outside of their ideal climates, you end up emitting a lot more for things like fertilizer than whatever you emit for longer distance transportation.

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