Local food debate.

• Author: Wise, Carla A.
• Position: FROM READERS - Letter to the editor

Sarah DeWeerdt makes some important and often-overlooked points in the cover story of your May/June 2009 issue, "Is Local Food Better?" It is increasingly clear that many factors besides travel distance affect the environmental impact of our food choices. Farming methods and inputs, climate suitability, scale, processing, packaging, and mode of transport all matter.

However, DeWeerdt glosses over the critical hole in this debate about whether local food is a better environmental choice. As she correctly points out, all other things being equal, it is better to purchase something grown locally than the same thing grown far away. But all other things are not equal. I have yet to see a life-cycle analysis (LCA) comparing the same foods that one might eat (an apple, a head of lettuce, a pound of ground beef) from local and industrial sources. Without such comparisons, the true environmental costs of our industrial food system, and the true environmental benefits of rebuilding local food systems, cannot be accurately measured.

The problem with the Weber and Matthews study that DeWeerdt discusses is that it is based on the assumption that the only difference between locally sourced and conventionally sourced food is the distance it travels. This is clearly a flawed assumption, as the authors of the study concede. I think DeWeerdt failed to see...