Disclaimer: The views expressed in all letters to the editor and editorials are the opinions of the respective writers. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Missouri Miner editors and staff.

Last semester, Chartwells hosted a program entitled “It Takes You – Eat Local,” where all the food served to students had been acquired by local farmers within a 150 mile radius of the university. The Eat Local movement has been gaining in popularity as a way for the average person to help their local economy and reduce their carbon footprint.

On the surface, eating locally sounds great. Money stays in the community to be put into local businesses, consumers eat produce that is fresher and contains fewer preservatives, and produce is moved shorter distances reducing pesky fossil fuel usage for transport. Yet, like everything else, the Eat Local regime should be taken with a grain of salt.

Let’s start by taking a look at the claim that eating local food reduces your carbon footprint. Eat Local followers, sometimes called ‘locavores’, measure out the ‘food miles’ that each item travels from the point of production to the point of consumption. They argue that by reducing the food miles that each item travels, you are reducing the amount of fossil fuels burnt in the transport of that item. Some have even been calling for these food miles to be printed on the labels of food items.

However, farmer’s markets are not located as close as the average grocery store. Is it better for hundreds of farmers and consumers to drive 20-50 miles to the local farmer’s market to buy a couple hundred pounds of produce than it is to ship thousands of pounds of efficiently packed potatoes 1,000 miles by rail or truck to the grocery store down the street?

Additionally, food miles don’t take into account how the food was produced. Only four percent of the carbon dioxide produced by the growth, distribution and consumption of food comes from the transport of food according to a Newsweek article released in 2007. Many common foods can not be grown locally or year round in natural conditions. They require greenhouses, special fertilizers, lights, and climate control systems to grow. These systems use massive amounts of energy. This makes shipping oranges from California look much more appealing than attempting to cultivate them in greenhouses in Missouri.

Another argument for the Eat Local movement is that money stays in your community, promoting the local economy. You pay a local farmer and then the farmer puts that money back into the community. But where do you think farmers are buying their equipment, fertilizers, seeds, and other necessities? Certainly not from a local provider, unless the local provider can offer the best price.

If you want to save the environment with your eating habits, it has to go deeper than just purchasing your food from the nearest farmer. Try cutting down on your meat consumption. Meat, specifically animals that are raised on feed products, can be a huge source of carbon dioxide emissions. According to a study from Lincoln University in New Zealand, lamb raised in the natural clover pastures in New Zealand and shipped 11,000 miles to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton. However, lamb produced locally in Britain and raised on feed produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton.

Stop wasting good food. If you buy it, eat it before it expires. A study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture says that in America, 96 billion pounds of food are wasted each year. That’s 3,044 pounds per second. Before you become concerned about wasting energy transporting your food, maybe you should take a look at how much food you are buying and then not consuming.

No one thing is going to save the environment, and environmental fads like the Eat Local movement will not do a lot of good unless the participants look at the root of the problem, inefficient production of non-seasonal crops in local greenhouses and extravagant waste of food. So next time you’re out to save the environment one grocery cart at a time, buy only what you need and don’t feel so bad about buying those oranges from California.