Myth Busting Drivel
Every day journalists churn out stories that are at best worthless and at worst dishonourable propaganda. Mostly it’s just the banal moron culture of ‘news’ about Heather Mills / Britney Spears and so on. Last Sunday the Observer published an article about the ‘myths of food miles’ which was difficult to define (you can read it here) but was so chock full of misinformation and wonky analysis that its worth responding to. My guess is that this is part of a concerted fightback from the corporate food world against the implications of the growing demand for local eating. Lets be charitable to Robin McKie and Caroline Davies, the authors and assume they’re deeply naive and not just abit thick.
Here’s a point by point rebuttal of the articles argument, such as they are. The authors argue:
1. “There is growing evidence to suggest that some air-freighted food is greener than food produced in the UK.” Is there? What is that evidence? Certainly none is presented in their article. Of course if I try and replicate exotic fruits in Caithness that’s going to be expensive and ecologically unsound. Nobody involved in the Fife diet argues that, as was explained to these journalists. All we are presented with is a series of ridiculous straw men.
2. “Mike Small argues that we should eat local produce and save the planet, an idea that has obliged his family – and a growing number of adherents to his cause – to eat meals of local lamb, pork and a great many dishes based on parsnips, beetroots, kale, potatoes, leeks and all the other root vegetables that typify the agricultural output of this wind-swept corner of Scotland. ” I haven’t obliged anyone to do anything. What’s windswept about Fife? Did Robin and Caroline visit and have a windswept experience?
3. “They even have their own name for themselves – locavores – and insist that their way is the only one to save the planet.” No we don’t insist any such thing. They’ve just made this up. We realise that food is just one way that we are all going to have to change our culture and our economy. This was explained to them.
Locavores is a pretentious sounding name we’ve never used.
4. “The idea that ‘only local is good’ has come under attack. For a start, food grown in areas where there is high use of fertilisers and tractors is likely to be anything but carbon-friendly, it is pointed out.” Well this is bloody obvious isn’t it? That’s why we use and advocate the use of organic food.
5. The they reel out a series of obscure ‘experts’. “‘The concept of food miles is unhelpful and stupid. It doesn’t inform about anything except the distance travelled,’ Dr Adrian Williams, of the National Resources Management Centre at Cranfield University. Cranfield University no less! Well of course miles by themselves is on aspect of a wider set of analysis you can apply to any food, but we’ve never argued any different. Cost is one other major issue, articulary so that poorer families can feed themselves decent food and organics move away from being an exclusive brand to a mainstream staple.
Writing in the observers sister paper, the Guardian, Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, says the era of cheap food in the UK is over, and that the nation is “sleepwalking into a crisis”. He points out that the UK has an especially poor record on producing its own fruit and vegetables. “Ninety-five per cent of fresh fruit is imported. This is ludicrous in a country with 2,000 varieties of apples,” he says. More on an exciting urban agriculture project in Middlesborough here.
6. There follows an entirely spurious idea to persuade us that flying beans from Kenya is actually, somehow a good idea: “But a warning that beans have been air-freighted does not mean we should automatically switch to British varieties if we want to help the climate. Beans in Kenya are produced in a highly environmentally-friendly manner. ‘Beans there are grown using manual labour – nothing is mechanised,’ says Professor Gareth Edwards-Jones of Bangor University, an expert on African agriculture. ‘They don’t use tractors, they use cow muck as fertiliser; and they have low-tech irrigation systems in Kenya. They also provide employment to many people in the developing world. So you have to weigh that against the air miles used to get them to the supermarket.’
As I’ve just said, we advocate organic agriculture here. Behind this seems to be the suggestion that we are here to serve the market, not that the market is here to serve us.
But now we’re getting to the possible agenda that’s being pursued here: “In the words of Gareth Thomas, Minister for Trade and Development, speaking at a recent Department for International Development air-freight seminar: ‘Driving 6.5 miles to buy your shopping emits more carbon than flying a pack of Kenyan green beans to the UK.’ Is that true? I’d like to see how that calculations was made (!). But then, as was explained to the journalists, we advocate taking part in vegetable box delivery schemes and don’t drive about to collect our food. Though even if we did – we would be doing the same journey as someone driving to a supermarket to buy their Kenyan green beans.
7. Finally, they write: “Even if you could get a carbon label that accurately reflects a product’s impact on the environment and identify products that have high footprints, would you be right in boycotting them? In many cases, such as brands of coffee, these products come from struggling third world nations. Using our Western concerns with the climate as an excuse to increase poverty there has dubious ethical consequences.” Our Western concerns??? Not only is the West historically culpable but is also by far the greatest contemporary ‘carbon criminal’ and yet is is the developing countries who suffer the most from climate chaos now. This attempt to characterise concern about climate changes as some sort of fashionable Western fad is pathetic and entirely misleading.
In short this article is drivel. The issue of global warming and the imperatives of changing our world remains essential, despite industry, politicians and pliant journalists efforts to pretend otherwise. Should we have expected otherwise? Maybe not. This was after all in the Observer, the newspaper who’s last piece on the Fife Diet described it as being based in “Fife, a small island off the North-East Coast of Scotland.”
March 27, 2008 at 2:10 pm
I wouldn’t listen seriously to anybody who thinks Fife is an island! (I have previously been asked if Wales is an island, so I know how you feel…)
March 27, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Very glad to see this post, with it’s point by point rebuttal of the drivel in the Observer, a newspaper that should know better, unless it’s seriously trying to become the Daily Mail. it made me cross enough to have a little rant on my blog, which you may be interested to see on joannasfood.blogspot.com/2008/03/rant-about-air-freighted-food.html
I’m just going to add a link to this post …
Your project is very inspiring
Joanna
March 27, 2008 at 4:10 pm
I would have expected more from The Observer to be honest. There seems to be a mood amongst journalists at the moment that there is a backlash against environmental issues, and when they can’t find any evidence of it then they create it themselves.
March 27, 2008 at 5:21 pm
I read this article and was thrown into a panic! I’m glad you have rebutted th claims there. I hope you can perhap email this article to the editor and ask for a similar sized spread in next weeks observer. If I can’t trust the observer then who can I turn to???
ps Are the ferries still running to the island in this windy weather?
March 28, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Yeah its been a bit tricky getting off the island to drive about for miles buying non-organic out of season pineapples.
March 28, 2008 at 4:51 pm
The step from shop to kitchen is often pointed out to be rather energy-inefficient, so it should be fairly easy to dig up some figures to illuminate the issue – I know I have come across this in the past (sorry I don’t have anything to hand at the moment). Personally, I don’t worry because I don’t drive. As you rightly point out, this is not a reason to just give up.
The other somewhat valid point they have is that imported food may be sometimes more energy-efficient than locally-grown, when the food in question is not suited to local conditions or is being eaten out of season. And the point is that this does indeed happen. To my mind this is something that does have to be addressed – it’s simply not very sustainable to expect to eat certain things all the time.
In conclusion, I think the dangerous thing about that article, and others in a similar vein, is that it makes many valid points. This is a complex system, it is not trivial to analyse, and a nice simple message “X good, Y bad” is by nature imperfect. But these imperfections provide ammunition for the combative world of the journalist: thus the straw-man thesis “food miles entirely and perfectly capture the environmental cost of eating” is demolished, and the headline feels able to state “the myth of food miles hurts the planet” when in fact the article shows no such thing. Joe consumer goes on as before (or worse), when perhaps buying locally would be an improvement *overall*.
March 28, 2008 at 5:19 pm
I’m not exactly sure what my point is going to be here, because I feel something cathartic coming on rather than rational so I’ll just be as brief as possible in saying that we either ignore the media when its deliberately provoking controversy or spend our lives and waste a lot of energy justifying ourselves in the face of a gargantuan propaganda machine in the business of … (I think there’s a word for it)… er sophistry – that’s it, as in “confusing or illogical argument used for deceiving someone” (wikipedia definition). This is a bit reminiscent of the Great Global Warming Swindle (if we still want to bother referring to that). So why bother? I feel sure most people would have seen the holes in that argument, staring them right in the face.
March 28, 2008 at 8:32 pm
I hear the continued frustration about inaccurate reporting of interviews! I think it is definately worth posting rebuttels of this sort, not so much to reply to the journalists in question, but so that readers can hear your point of view. I wrote a post on the Observer piece which gave them some moderate praise for acknowledging the complexity behind food miles, and not simply suggesting that “measuring food miles is the answer” or “food miles is a load of nonsense”. It seems that however, factually inaccurate/unsubstantiated McKie’s article might be, it shows signs of developing a more balanced approach…. (although I guess you might disagree!)
I’d be interested to hear what’s said if they respond to your rebuttal.
April 1, 2008 at 2:43 am
Just another thought about Kenyan green beans (or whatever product you’d like to stand in their stead): the journalist Fred Pearce has a pretty interesting point of view in his book When The Rivers Run Dry when he raises the ethics of essentially importing water in the form of exported goods (beans, flowers, etc) from drought-prone parts of the world. That is to say, is it ethical to remove the equivalent of the x litres of water it took to grow your beans in Kenya from that country?
I also don’t think it’s necessarily right to argue that avoiding such products is unethical because we’re forgetting the plight of farmers in the developing world who depend on such crops. Wouldn’t it be better for the farmer who grows a cash crop for the West now (subject to highly volatile prices) to be growing food for his own region at some point in the near future? What about supporting truly sustainable agriculture in the developing world, for the developing world? (And the same here too!)
Thanks for the post. I find the Observer can be often quite barmy. Perhaps because its a Sunday, they think we’re not paying attention.
April 1, 2008 at 8:28 pm
You’re quite right Nat. The argument is based on a quaint understanding of market forces and the ‘free market’ in particular. The reality is often that producers are subject to the vagaries of a fluctuating commodity market and are often exporting food in a region where people are going hungry. I’m in favour of fair trade, feral trade and trade justice – but not trade for trades sake in some naive hope that consumer capitalism – the system which ultimately has brought about the ecological crisis, will also somehow, magically, solve it.