Local Food - Criticism

Criticism

Though there are many reasons to prefer local food (for example freshness), the use of food miles as a strict purchasing metric has been criticized. For example, the carbon footprint of foods depends on much more than the distance travelled, including energy inputs of production. One study found that only 11% of food-related greenhouse gas emissions came from transport (and only 4% from delivery from producer to retailer), whereas 83% of GHG emissions came from food production. Animal products such as meat and dairy foods take considerably more energy to produce, meaning a vegetarian diet has a much lower carbon footprint, regardless of food miles. Fair trade advocates point out that the livelihoods of poor farmers can be greatly improved by giving them a global market which includes distant developed countries.

Further information: Food miles

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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:

    “It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
    —Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)

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    “Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
    —Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)