Stepping lightly on the planet.

Mark was telling me over bedtime snack about an energy-efficiency presentation he'd been to at work the other day.  "I had to leave just as they were getting to the buy-local part," he said, as he cut an apple into quarters, "or I would have offered my opinion on eliminating the environmental costs of  food transportation."

"What's that?"

"Well," he said, spreading peanut butter on a chunk of apple, "depending on how you figure it out, adding up all the carbon emissions from food transportation in the U.S., that's only 12 percent of the total carbon emissions from food.  Production of food emits far, far more carbon than driving it around does.  So what you're eating matters a lot more than where it came from."

"Twelve percent isn't nothing.  We could still bring it down a bit, couldn't we?"

"Well, yeah, maybe by a couple of percent.  It won't really make much of a dent.  And it's kind of complicated because you've got to figure out where you're going to get all the different things you want to eat, or what to substitute for them."

"And if it's not ordinary grocery store stuff, you have to drive all over the place trying to find them all," I mused, thinking of my weekly drive out to Wayzata to pick up the local-organic-grass-fed-milk for my family and Hannah's.

"Yeah, and when you bring food-preservation into the picture you're stuck trying to make complicated calculations about the relative energy costs of steel-can manufacturing versus keeping frozen stuff cold, yadda yadda yadda.  But," he continued, gesturing with his peanut butter knife, "I can tell you what you can do, one very simple thing, that will make a dent in your food-related carbon footprint that is equivalent to having all the food you eat grown and produced at your very doorstep."

"What's that?"

"Eat twelve percent less."

"Um..."

"Twelve percent less.  Across the board."

"Calories, or volume, or what?"

He shrugged.  "Doesn't matter all that much.  Let's just say, mass or volume, twelve percent less of everything you normally eat, just eat twelve percent less of it."

"So if I normally eat a cup of rice, I should eat seven-eighths of a cup of rice."

"Yup.  Do that with everything you eat, it's the same impact as if you eliminated all the transportation costs of your food."

"Hmm.  Consume less by consuming less.  A radical idea."

"It's kind of like eating less meat by eating less meat.  Or saving money by buying less stuff.  You know, instead of 'the more you buy the more you save.'"

"Hmm.  It's not for everyone, I suppose, but if I went outside and looked around, I think I'd come to the conclusion that it would be a good choice for a lot of people."

"Yes.  Of course, fat people are carbon sinks, so there's that, but I think the total carbon balance still comes out positive if they just eat less."

"Talk about going on an energy diet."

Comments

[JD Carriere]

You drank the Carbon-KoolAid?

Oh no.

http://jdcarriere.blogspot.com/2008/04/earth-day.html

[Derek]

Ditto that, JD Carriere.

[bearing]

This is really my husband's Kool-Aid.