Blog Action Day - Climate Change

So, here we are again at Blog Action Day! This year, the topic is climate change, which has a lot to do with transportation, which this blog has a lot to do with.

I want to take a bit of a twist on the theme however, for this post, and mix it with something I'm also quite enthusiastic about - food. How do sustainable food practices relate to transportation and climate change? Here's how.

In the U.S., and indeed globally (to a lesser extent), much of the food products that are sold at supermarkets are transported very very long distances. They are produced, and mass-produced, in places where it is cheaper or more convenient to do so, and they are then loaded on trains, trucks, or airplanes to be shipped long distances, at great expense of energy, to supermarkets all over the world.

The highway infrastructure in the U.S. was set up in the 1940's and 1950's, when nobody was thinking about the potential environmental impacts of such mass amounts of travel. During much of that time, the U.S. government subsidized 90% of any highway project that was proposed. The boom of highways started to make it easy to transport food in mass quantities across city, state and even country lines. Today in the U.S., about 40% of our carbon emissions come from automobiles of one type or another.

Not only is all of this mass-produced food transported at huge cost of energy and emissions, but the need for such mass-production has led to things like destroying massive swaths of forest to plant crops or raise livestock, which hugely damages the earth's ability to absorb the ever-growing air pollution (this is one reason I love that Portland counts trees as a capital asset of the city - three cheers for cleaner air!).

So, with the mass highway/freeway boom, mass production and mass movement of food products, you inevitably loose quality and as we have seen, we adopt all kinds of sketchy practices in order to preserve our food products longer, since they have to make a potentially several day trip just to a store, plus have some shelf life, plus last at the person's home once they buy it.

Here's what a more sustainable (in the literal sense of the word) food production process does for us. Food is grown near where it is consumed. That way, the food is fresher, tastes better, has less chance of spoiling and doesn't need to have grotesque things done to it to keep it from spoiling, and costs less in transportation costs, energy usage and harmful emissions. The necessity for massive food and livestock farms in places like Brazil is greatly diminished, since you have smaller farms near places where people live, which produce food for those people. That means that the forests get left largely in-tact, which preserves not only the earth's ability to absorb air pollution, but entire ecosystems of plants and animals, and the habitats of many groups of humans who are displaced.

It is true that in this kind of a system, you might just have to live with not having bananas in January, depending on where you live, but getting more into cooking myself, I have really enjoyed cooking more and more seasonal items, and I think if you cook and eat seasonally, you come to appreciate the foods more, since you can't just eat them whenever you want.

It's exciting to me, for these reasons and others, to see Portland emphasizing urban growth boundary, urban farming, and non-motorized transportation. I can go to a market in inner Portland which sells produce that was grown at a farm only 30 minutes away, or potentially by my next-door neighbor. I can grow my own produce in the city, raise chickens or goats. I can find a farmers' market in almost any major neighborhood in inner Portland, some of which are year-round. There are a number of businesses starting to crop up in Portland which are delivering food products and other items within the city by cargo-bicycle - so a farm, for instance, might drive their produce an hour into the city to this company, where the produce is then packed into cargo bicycles and delivered to sites within the city. This saves extra truck driving time, street traffic (which is a major cause of pollution), street parking, and still allows the efficient distribution of those goods within the city.

So here's to local farms, ethical food production practices, fresh, healthy and delicious foods, and cleaner air - all things we have largely forgotten about here in the U.S., but have urgent need of remembering.