Egg Miles

At the family Christmas party, my aunt and I got to talking about the food system and we spent some time talking about the environmental impacts of hauling food across the country. I’m less concerned about food miles than I used to be, in part because of a presentation I saw earlier this month at the CFANS Solution-Driven Science Symposium.

Roger A. Cady of Elanco Animal Health, who also worked for Monsanto for nine years, gave a presentation entitled Environmental Sustainability: A Benefit of Animal Productivity. Cady’s industry perspective often made me hot under the collar, but I tried to keep an open mind and appreciate the data he presented. For example, he broke down oft-cited Food and Agriculture Organization’s statistic that 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions are from animal agriculture. He showed that half that number is due to deforestation. The U.S., however, is a reforesting country, which brings our percentage down to 2.

Furthermore, Cady had a graph showing that transportation accounts for only 4% of the dairy industry’s greenhouse gas emission (the greatest amount occurs at the farm). He continued with an illustrative example comparing two vehicles. Vehicle 1 burned 70 gallons of gas in one hour, Vehicle 2—10 gallons. Both traveled 350 miles. Which is greener?

Don’t answer yet! There’s additional relevant information: Vehicle 1 had 50 passengers; Vehicle 2—4 passengers. That’s 17,500 people-miles and 250 people-miles per gallon (mpg) for Vehicle 1, compared to 1400 people-miles and 140 people-mpg for Vehicle 2.

This is a simplified example of Life Cycle Assessment, a complex and holistic method for analyzing the environmental impact of a service or product. Rather than focusing on the production process (gallons of fuel burned, miles per gallon), LCA calls for looking at the rest of the picture, including assessing the environmental impact per unit of output.

Photo credit: tiny banquet committee

So take eggs. Fill a refrigerated truck with hundreds of dozens of eggs and ship them a hundred miles to Cub or Rainbow. You’re going to get pretty good egg-miles. But if you’re a local farmer driving fifty miles to a farmer’s market with maybe twenty dozen eggs, your egg-mpg will be pitiful, according to Cady’s analysis. And then what about all of the people driving to the farmers’ market, taking home only a dozen eggs each?

Other analyses concur. Weber and Matthews of the Green Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon found that transportation from producer to retailer accounts for only 4 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (one page summary, citing World-Watch article).

Does this mean we should forget about food miles and only purchase food that’s been transported in bulk? Not necessarily, because while LCA gives a broader view than production analysis, it does so with an environmental perspective. Clearly, there are other important perspectives:

• Social: Knowing your chicken farmer, being able to visit the farm. 
• Political: Are fresh eggs equally available in all communities? 
• Food safety: Are the eggs more likely to have Salmonella?

Food miles are the BMI of the food system—that one number just doesn’t tell the whole story.

Coming Home to Eat

Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, by Gary Paul Nabhan, Ph.D. (W.W. Norton & Co., 2002)

I do the bulk of my reading on the bus. I have a half-hour commute to school, which often translates to an hour of dedicated reading time per day. Sometimes when I don’t have something to read, I get anxious.

Coming Home to Eat is a result of that anxiety. I was searching through McGrath Library’s collection at the U of M, looking for something relevant to keep me going while I waited politely for my requested library books to show up. Gary Paul Nabhan’s book describing his year-long experiment in eating locally and related events during that year was an unexpected gem.

If this sounds like a knockoff of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, be assured that Coming Home to Eat came first. Also, it is undeniably different. There’s no reason to not read them back-to-back. If you do, you are in for 600+ pages of delicious prose.

Now, Nabhan is an bone fide ecologist and ethnobotanist, to be sure, but he is also a “rural lifeways folklorist,” and his list of credits includes a book of poetry. It shows. Here’s a passage wherein he describes eating freshly foraged greens.

Quelite. Photo credit: juanvc.

Tonight I entered quelite heaven, enjoying the freshest greens I could imagine. I grilled some scallions and poblano chiles, then added a mound of hand washed greens to the saucepan. … Their flavors were so fresh, so buzzed with their recent photosynthetic surge that my meal sizzled with sunshine. (142)

Coming Home to Eat is also fascinating because of the subject. If you raised an eyebrow at Barbara Kingsolver’s quest to eat locally in Virginia, raise two at Nabhan’s quest to eat within 250 miles of his home in desert-y southern Arizona.

Many of the foods he eats are totally unfamiliar to me—thank goodness for Hannah Hinchman’s pen and ink illustrations—mesquite tortillas and roasted mescal, dried tepary beans and cholla cactus buds.

And that’s one of the two things I like about this book. Nabhan introduced me to the food resources of the southwestern deserts, something I know nothing about, and something I don't necessarily need know about. I live in Minnesota, I want to eat things grown in Midwestern soil.

I'm appropriately astonished at the variety that desert soil produces and heartened that some people still know how to find and prepare it. What I can take inspiration from is Nabhan's creation of access points to alternate food resources, his purchases of mesquite tortillas from Esperanza and duck eggs from Ms. Soto.

I was mightily refreshed by the narrative style of Coming Home to Eat. I read a lot of nonfiction nowadays and there's often a stark difference between these nonfiction texts and novels. Nabhan blurred the line between these two forms, including touches like dialogues with his sweetheart Laurie, mulling over the death of his stepfather, and describing a meeting with the EPA over Bt corn. Illustrative facts and figures, important names and dates are all there, as is a comprehensive index.

The blend of professional and personal, presented with polished prose stirs a deeper, more holistic reaction to the message I've heard so many times.

Updated April 2015.

Why am I here?

I am here to read, to think, to write about the connections between healthy land, healthy food, and healthy life. It’s a broad theme. It has to be.

That’s the justification in a nutshell. For the whole meal deal, keep on reading.

The seminal reason for starting this blog is selfish and has to do with my high school social studies teacher, Mr. Scarlett. He had us write one-page reflections on almost every reading he assigned. Standard practice for students, but he claimed he did the same in his own life. Always attracted to record-keeping, I continued the practice outside the classroom and diligently wrote down something about almost every book I read. I wrote on lined paper, scrap paper, colored paper, and white paper, sometimes for several pages, sometimes just one line.

These pages are three-hole punched and sit quietly in a big black binder next to a big blue binder of financial records. Keeping a record of what I've read for its own sake seems increasingly pointless to me. I need to not simply absorb and document, but also read and reflect. This blog will help me to reflect.

Also pointless is relegating the thoughts and reactions I had to a static binder when I what I read nowadays feels so urgent. People don’t need to know what I thought about The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway, but I would like to tell them about Coming Home to Eat and the Heathy Food, Healthy Lives Institute. I want to share with others the complex and fascinating fields I'm picking my way through.

I am no longer focused on the corner of Nutrition. In fact, my love affair with the topic imploded earlier this semester. Our relationship was tested when I began making reluctant friends with the Food System. Things came to a head during a Human Nutrition assignment to frame a nutrition-related question and review the relevant literature. I found that studying the effects of a single nutrient in a randomized clinical trial involves asking very specific questions with a limited vocabulary. I found that the data analysis from epidemiological studies is beyond my comprehension. In short, I found that all the nice tidy details I found in my intro textbooks are not tidy at all.

Nutrition is certainly not the unique in this aspect. Push any area of study far enough and you will find its limits. One could view these limits as opportunities, take up research, and find more answers. My reaction, however, has been to step back - way back. I asked Nutrition if we could just be friends. I need some space right now. I need to see what else is out there.

Since my classes are not designed to address the Food System, I happily seek access points elsewhere, both on and off campus. I read books, I attend seminars, I watch the occasional movie. These are what I want to digest and disseminate. So stay tuned! I hope to post updates once a week. Send me things to read, events to attend, movies to watch, and ask questions. I look forward to engaging with you.

Updated January 2015.