by Tom Laskawy
No, this isn't another cap-and-trade post. I'm talking about the yummy kind of markets. As we grapple with ways to reform food production in this country, one problem that crops up is the loss over time of the old farm-to-market networks that fed cities before air freight and transcontinental trucking took over. So even if we wanted to - or more ominously - were forced to re-regionalize our food distribution system, the infrastructure no longer exists. This desire, by the way, is not motivated simply by a need to reduce food miles - a misleading measure for sure. I and others have talked at length about the misplaced focus on food miles as a way to guide food distribution. Rail, for example, is an especially good way to move food long distances - especially compared to the option of driving huge fleets of diesel trucks even relatively short distances (which is why rail freight stimulus is such a great idea. Right, Ryan?). But as we explore ways to reform industrial agriculture and its reliance on fossil fuels in food production, more, smaller farms inevitably come up as an alternative - and for that sort of system to work, they would need to be proximate to population centers. Speaking of the food miles argument, it's likely that, using our existing infrastructure, exclusively procuring produce from farms within, say, 75 miles of urban centers would cause the transportation component of agricultural carbon emissions to go way up. So, there's a lot to do before anything like this could happen.
