Most of the studies on GHGE has been using weight as denominator and usually ignores the impact of waste.

Using calories and/or nutrient (like vitamins and stuff) as the denominator, meat looks a whole lot better and vegetables a lot worse. Beef is still terrible (cows fart a lot) in most studies (in the absence of some techniques that don't seem to have any traction) but even then the gap isn't as big as some people portray.

Include the fact a LOT of "fresh" stuff is wasted, we end up in situations where the gap is very small or even in the opposite direction in most cases.

Let me know when I can start smoking cigarettes again.

So buying vegetables and letting them rot is not great for the environment? Wow.

Nobody said any of this. By all means, keep experimenting.

But yes, dumb hippies who care more about their conscience than real science.

Pretty ****ing easy to find any number of examples of real science being applied in ways that hurt more than conscience. Even if your avatar for hippies are wrong it doesn’t make you right.

A lot of it just isn't sold because people are obsessed over "fresh." Vegetables would be a lot more environmentally friendly if people are okay with frozen stuff (which are nutritionally very close, the same, or even better.)

Even beyond that, "fresh" food is for obvious reasons difficult to keep fresh. They also tend to be heavy and occupy a lot of space, making them expensive to ship and store.

See this. There is a reason most of the food wasted in the episode is vegetables.

I was just addressing the transportation miles. it's to do with the quantities travelling together and how it's organsied

If 100 people who live close together, travel 100 miles together by coach to do a job then the miles(carbon)/job is less than if more independent local labour is employed who each travel an average of 5 miles by car. In "planet killing terms" it's the local labour that travelled further per person even though each individual obviously travelled further

Food is very complex but the non local stuff travels the long distances in extremely large quantities. It's far less obvious which has greater transportation per item than it might simplistically appear. Depends on the quantities, types of transportation, how the farms are organised etc etc.

All I cared about was the ridiculousness of Chez's statement, it's an unending battle fighting against his stupidity but worth the effort. I'm not anti-gmo or efficient growth of food. Local food is probably more sustainable than food shipped around the world, but we are so far removed from paying the real price for food that there are better hills to die on.

And true to form, Chez doubles down on his stupidity.

Chez, as a logic problem lets break the route from field to market for food into segments and see if that helps with the brain teaser "does local food's travel use more carbon than non-local food"

The segments are:
Farm to warehouse
Warehouse to distributer
Distributer to market

If you don't agree with these segments, please add your own. There could obviously be more warehouse to warehouse or even distributor to warehouse to distributor type trips but for a simple model this should do.

Farm to warehouse - For simplicity if we assume that on average, the first step from farm to market is roughly the same regardless of location this is a wash.

Warehouse to distributor - You're suggesting that shipping food from warehouse to distributor is also a wash because the amount of foreign food moved is so huge. Without evidence to the contrary this doesn't sound remotely true unless you assume distributors at the terminals for the planes, trains, and boats used to moved food around the globe. I find this doubtful and certainly not universal. I would imagine significant parts of this leg are using the same trucks regardless of location.

Distributor to market - a wash.

I know you hate backing up anything you say with anything so tawdry as proof, but do you think you could come up an example where moving food from the East coast to a West coast state is less carbon intensive than food grown in that West coast state?

Chez could have a point there. If non-local food comes from giant industrial farms that farm to warehouse step could be vastly different than farm to warehouse for small local farmers. A train running next to the farm could make all the difference there. That first trip with 10 boxes of food in the back of an F-150 could be more miles and emissions per pound of food than the whole rest of the trip.

Yeah, I wasn’t saying you held any position other than the argument is silly because it’s too broad.

Why are people anti-gmo? I mean it’s fun to laugh at the uninformed people who think it is Frankenfood that will mutate them or whatever, but there are real concerns with how the technology can be applied, unintended consequences and what the incentives and motives are of the direction they go with it. I mean, hooray for science and all, but unbridaled scientific ambition fueled by money motives has got us in some pretty bad spots and that includes with farming.

And who is anti-efficient food growth? Like is that even a position? How about anti-efficiency for the soul sake of profit and at the expense of the environment?

Water is WAYYYY more available/cheaper in the Lousiana basin than pretty much everywhere else in the US. Shipping grown food from the basin to most parts of CA is almost certainly more efficient than trying to grow food in a desert.

Exactly. The point of the most common crop genetic engineering is the sales of specific pesticides by the companies doing the genetic engineering. And if their pesticides spread everywhere and only their seeds grow plants resistant to their pesticides - awesome!

Possible, the model is overly simplistic but without actual data it’s difficult to know how prevalent that is versus trucking stuff around.

In the long run probably. Obviously there's water in CA and a ton of food grows here - CA has the highest ag output of any state - and it's not really desert in the Central Valley. But aquifers are being depleted here and all over the west.

Below is probably an extreme location and maybe there are other local factors, but this is from the US Geological Survey and it's subsidence primarily due to removing groundwater.



http://www.latimes.com/local/califor...318-story.html

Indeed.

Also it's where you buy. I sometimes go to the local farmers market. I love the idea and much of the food is way better than the supermarket (which i also generally don't like). However it's basically a car park full of small vans that travel from up to ~40 miles away to sell a small van load of food. It's still not unusual to hear the very simplistic argument that it's better for the environment because it's local.

As some idiot pointed out at the beginning

Everybody should be gardening and growing food. It's one of the greatest feelings in the world. Even when there have been droughts here and water restrictions banned watering the garden, I managed to still grow some food. Combination of growing stuff that needs less water, water catchment and recycling water. Even if you live in an apartment you can grow herbs and sprouts etc.

WAT NUTRIENTS WTF ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT

If you take some acerola berries and some rose hips and put them in a machine and process them you get some chalky pills with 50x the vitamin C of an orange, so it can't be that.

Wait,


OK so now what's wrong with horse meat?