Imported vs. locally-bought food
There is often debate in the vegan community about imported vs. locally-bought food. The critique of imported foods mainly started as a strawman of veganism, claiming that vegans' effort to help the environment is pretty much useless because they would then buy imported food, thus increasing emissions for transportation.
Not only are vegans not required to buy food from far away in order to stay vegan, and not only that would not render the other benefits of veganism null, but it is also mainly a myth that locally-bought food is more sustainable and has better environmental consequences than imported food.
In fact, imported food often results in a lower carbon footprint, for 3 main points:
1 - Embodied energy/carbon from transport is a very small amount of the energy/carbon compared to what it takes to produce food and other products, with the majority of the energy/carbon being used in the growing/production of the produce itself.
For example, 1 ton (907kg) of organic potatoes grown in an efficient way requires around 82 kg of CO2 [1] to produce, while to transport 1 ton of produce for 1000 km, it is 62kg of CO2 by road, 22 kg of CO2 by train, and between 5 to 31 kg of CO2 by sea transport [2] --compared to the 82 kg of CO2 for growing the ton of potatoes, which is a food that does not require high amounts of CO2 to grow.
2 - Distribution infrastructure relies largely on very efficient modes of transportation like boat and train, the least efficient being the trucks that take things to their final destinations (but still far more efficient than a car considering the amount of goods they carry and the small relative share of that transportation type).
Moving produce is not like human transport, moving a 150 lb person in a 4,000 lb car over city streets, and it is made as efficient as possible--as shown with the example above.
3 - There is a shared cost when transporting fruits.
Similarly to people taking a bus and achieving less CO2 emissions when reaching their destination per person than if everybody went by car on their own, big quantities of produce being shipped together achieves a very low CO2 emission per produce.
When taking all three points in consideration, it becomes apparent that eating produce that is intensively and efficiently grown from outside the country is more feasible on a global scale than buying only local--i.e. eating avocados brought to you from half way around the world in a place ideally suited to growing them is more environmentally friendly than eating those grown in your town but achieving poor yields and quality per input.
If you eat local for environmental reasons, you should also only eat things that are:
- in season
- best suited to being grown where you live
- provide similar or superior yields for input compared to other non-local crops
Many places have no such foods, and for those places it is more environmentally friendly to import foods from where they grow more easily and more efficiently. Attempts to eat local turn out to be frequently counter-productive and increase carbon footprint.
