Spade & Spoon: Localizing the way Westerners Eat

The Potato Pilgrim: Defining Distance in a Migratory Food System

By Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, 2-14-07

NewWest.Net introduces this new feature, "Spade & Spoon" with Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel. Each week, this article will discuss the localization of the food system in the Rocky Mountain West by profiling organizations and individuals who are attending to the issues and possibilities of eating closer to home. This article is the first in the series. Stay tuned to www.newwest.net/spadeandspoon for more.

	Graphic information from FoodRoutes

Lynx can travel up to 700 miles to find food. Monarch butterflies fly 2,000. Bighorn sheep might saunter a few hundred yards or, if they are really pressed, go more than ten miles. The tiny Calliope hummingbird migrates farther, “per gram of flesh than any other warm blooded creature.” (see Daniel Mathews’ Rocky Mountain Natural History).

While some Rocky Mountain residents still migrate south for the winter, most of us aren’t migrating to follow food. Instead, food migrates to us. It travels via long chains of production, shipping and marketing while we sit and wait. These days, our food migrates more than most humans, and as it turns out, travels more than most animals.

Migratory lettuce that is shipped from California’s San Joaquin Valley, to Gillette, Wyoming, travels about 1,375 miles. The semi truck that carries it might get seven miles per gallon (Link opens PDF) and for this trip, would use 196 gallons of diesel fuel. (This is just for drive-time, and doesn’t include the amount it takes to cool or heat the cab while the driver is resting or to refrigerate the truck.) With the same amount of unleaded fuel, a Toyota Prius could drive roundtrip from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Baja, and follow the 10,000 mile migration route of the California gray whale, the farthest migrating mammal on earth.

The potato pilgrim can go even farther if it is made into our favorite French fries or potato chips. Most potatoes are grown in the West, shipped east for processing and then sent west again to be sold. They might travel from their Idaho home to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where the potatoes are cut, fried and packaged as potato chips and shipped back to Idaho (about 5,300 miles). If they are shipped on the same semi as the lettuce, getting the same seven miles to the gallon, the trip would use 757 gallons of fuel. With this amount of unleaded, the Prius could get from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, three times. That’s 45,000 miles. Only the sooty shearwater, a slim bird now thought to be the longest migrating animal in the world, travels this far (according to this story in The Times Online.)

It’s a bit more difficult to calculate the distance that processed food travels. Fortunately, the folks at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture have figured out an equation to calculate the itinerary of a multiple ingredient food. It’s called the weighted average source distance (WASD, again, link is to PDF) and it goes like this:

where
k=different locations of the production origin,
m=amount consumed from each location of consumption origin, and
d=distances from the locations of production origin to the point of consumption…






Who knew that eating was algebraic?

The quantified distance has revealed that food travels an average of 1,300 miles from field to fork (although some speculate that the figure is more like 2,000+ miles). This fun food-factoid seems to have seeped into the subconscious of most Americans, right along with the idea that buying organic food is good for the earth, people and animals.

But as the organic movement becomes an industry (a big one at that, growing 28 percent since 2003 according to a 2006 Organic Trade Association report), it too is all about going the distance. To be profitable, many in the organics industry use the current, centralized food system already in place to grow crops in one location and then ship them out. (The model has also included centralized ownership (PDF) of the organics industry.) In some cases this system has lowered the cost of organic food for consumers. But as usual, cheaper goods come with hidden costs. While organics means fewer pesticides it hasn’t necessarily reduced fuel consumption or food miles.

Organic food miles are just as easily calculated as conventional, and as processed organic foods become more popular, the WASD equation would reveal their distance. But even the WASD equation doesn’t include the cumulative distance of all the things used to grow food. It doesn’t include the distance that fertilizers are shipped, or the soil, seeds or ladybird beetles (ladybugs) that some organic farmers order each spring to eat the eggs of the ruinous potato beetle. It does not account for the thousands of pounds of produce lost in shipping accidents.

Useful equations like the WASD make an amorphous food system tangible. But with calculations, there is always the possibility of missing something.

And really, it just doesn’t take a math wiz to understand why this complex food system is so problematic. Just as we know that we should eat more fruits and vegetables and eat food that our great-great-grandmothers would recognize (see Michael Pollan’s Jan 28th article, New York Times Magazine) we know that the distance between growers and eaters expends fuel we don’t have, doesn’t pay farmers what it should, gets over-processed and is often too sweet for our bodies to understand and use. With this distance, eaters don’t see the fields or farmers. We do not see the slaughter houses, production facilities, farm workers, truck drivers…even our memory of the supermarket checker is fogged by tabloid headlines.

But we have grown accustomed to the distance. We like bananas and potato chips. Global foods are a part of our culture and lives. Accustomed to such comfort, can we really localize the food system?

Just defining how far food can travel and remain local is a quagmire – especially in the Rocky Mountain West. This is a landscape defined by distance. We drive a hundred miles to have dinner with a friend and think nothing of it. We covet the rimmed view of a full horizon.

With so much physical space between us, our food can migrate more than other regions in the United States. There are also practical concerns that lead us to ship food farther…cold dark months and long, dry ones, limited processing facilities and distribution options, misinformation, legislation, economic risk…

And yet, around the Rocky Mountain West, individuals and organizations are focusing on these issues. Rather than calculate locality, they are creating it. They are working to improve local food systems because eating locally reduces food miles, provides tasty and fresh produce, uses less fuel, and keeps food dollars in the local economy.

To better understand what it takes to limit the distance food travels from spade to spoon, this column will profile the organizations, leaders, activists, eaters and farmers who are focused on creating a localized food system. Each Tuesday, Spade & Spoon will also clarify a particular issue or opportunity associated with localization so that readers might locate themselves in this migratory food system and begin to do more than move food; so that our beloved potato chips won’t require enough gas to fuel a Prius’ bi-continental travel; and so our food stops migrating like the sooty shearwater.

If you have article ideas for Spade & Spoon (www.newwest.net/spadeandspoon), email kisha@newwest.net.

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