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 milesRead more about this topic: Local Food
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)