NEWS

Change your menu and save the planet?

05/22/2008

Sara Goodman, ClimateWire reporter

Climate change means different things to different people. To Tim LaSalle, chief executive of the Rodale Institute, it has brought opportunity: the acceleration of a trend his group has been pushing for years. He wants to make people more aware of where their groceries come from and how they are produced. To the Rodale folks, saving the planet can begin by altering your dinner menu.

"People are concerned about their health, and they’re getting worried about the chemicals and pesticides that are in regular farming," LaSalle said. "They’re trying to get cleaner, safer food and many understand they’re making an environmental commitment."

What’s new is that this message is resonating well beyond the crunchy granola set. In recent months, organically grown food has been a better bet than the stock market. Food producers are beginning to prick up their ears. According to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center, a consortium of Iowa State University, Kansas State University and the University of California, the organic food market has grown nearly 20 percent per year for the last seven years as climate-consciousness has spread.

"If you go organic, you eliminate fossil fuel, which is the primary carbon footprint around food," LaSalle said. "If we converted every farm in the United States to our methods, we could take out about a quarter of the greenhouse gases. There is nothing else that big out there."

Tim LaSalle, from a May 14, 2008, episode of E&ETV’s OnPoint.

Rodale has studied organic farming compared with conventional farming and found that organic farming can sequester carbon by using composting, cover crops and crop rotation, pulling carbon dioxide from the air and storing it as carbon in the soil. If the world’s 3.5 billion tillable acres used biological, regenerative practices, they could sequester up to 40 percent of current carbon dioxide emissions, the research found.

The U.S. food system contributes nearly 20 percent of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions, according to data from U.S. government research.

Conventional farming uses synthetic fertilizers, which break down organic material in the soil faster than is natural and release it into the air, LaSalle explained. For example, in the Midwest, prairie soils that once were 20 percent carbon are now between 1 percent and 2 percent, he said, meaning that carbon is now in the air.

A report released in 2005 showed that soil carbon in organic systems increased by 15 to 28 percent, the equivalent of taking about 3,500 pounds of carbon dioxide per hectare out of the air.

The same report, funded by Rodale, pointed to other benefits of organic farming, including restoring soil erosion and improving water quality. It showed that organic farming produces the same yields of corn and soybeans as does conventional farming, but uses 30 percent less energy, less water and no pesticides.

‘Quality rather than convenience’

It is a market movement that you might not see reflected in television commercials or at your local supermarket, but it’s going on in many communities. At a farmers’ market recently in Falls Church, Va., for example, Carol Rice was on the prowl for fresh produce with her husband and 6-year-old daughter. She was looking for two components: organic and local.

"A big draw is buying local because it saves resources, and there are certain things you know you can only buy here," she said.

Howard Herman, who runs a farmers’ market in Virginia, believes the organic trend is here to stay. Photo by Sara Goodman.

Howard Herman has been running the Falls Church farmers’ market for more than 20 years, and he has seen a growing number of people who are concerned about where their food comes from.

"More and more people are thinking about the ramifications of getting their food from the supermarket," Herman said. "Buying local makes more sense from an environmental standpoint. People understand there is a value in having farmland stay farmland and not converted to more housing."

Just what current price spikes in the commodities markets and the resulting high food prices may do to the pricier organic food market remains a mystery. "It’s a time of uncertainty, to know whether historic interest in organic will continue for the course of 2008 in light of sharply increased costs," said Greg Bowman, an editor at Rodale. "People who used to buy organic fare are now saying they can’t afford it."

Still, he thinks the upward trend in organic foods will have staying power. "I think people are going to want to have the kind of food for their family that links them to the region they’re in, and they’ll start putting dollars in for quality rather than convenience."

The onslaught of the ‘locavores’

In one sign that the movement to eat locally is growing, the "New Oxford American Dictionary" named "locavore"—a person who eats only locally grown foods—as its 2007 word of the year.

The word locavore was coined in 2005 by a group of four women in San Francisco who challenged local residents to try to eat only food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius for the month of August. The movement has spread, and other regional movements have emerged since then.

Some estimates put the average distance that grocery store produce travels at about 1,500 miles before reaching the table.

But a recent study published in Environmental Science & Technology found that despite the long distances, the dominant greenhouse gas emissions come from the production phase, so a product’s food-miles do not necessarily reflect a negative impact.

"We suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than ‘buying local,’" the report concluded. "Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more [greenhouse gas] reduction than buying all locally sourced food."

The benefits of buying locally surpass the basic carbon footprint calculations, though, because it is important to factor in the other values, supporters of the movement say. For one, it supports local farmers and producers. "You’re investing in the local community," LaSalle said. "One dollar can turn around seven times if it’s spent with the local farmer. In a chain store, there’s a two-and-a-half time turnaround because most of the money leaves town."

At the Falls Church farmers’ market, vendors are required to sell produce they have themselves grown or made. Herman, who in addition to running the market is the general manager of community services for the city of Falls Church, sells honey he makes from his beehives in northern Virginia, a hobby he has had for the past 15 years.

"It’s an amazing hobby—the challenges are so rewarding," he said. "There’s a pattern to watch, to see the hive develop and grow. You look to see if it’s a good queen or a bad queen, and see how the hive accepts her or doesn’t."

That idea of doing something for the community is one of the market’s main appeals, Herman said.

"There’s a value in community," he said. "You have to experience it to understand it, but there’s knowing you’re doing something to help local farmers stay in business."