Every Wednesday at the Union Street Farmers Market in Gainesville you can find a wide array of locally produced food including organic produce and vegan-friendly food carts. The Union Street Farmers Market, as well as the countless other farmers markets held nationwide, are believed to produce healthier, better tasting food and promote environmentally friendliness while bolstering local economies. Although these notions are commonly accepted as truth by the general public, these claims are gross overstatements of the menial impact of the local food movement.
The popularity of the local food movement and farmers markets has skyrocketed in recent years. According to the Consumer Reports health periodical about the benefits of eating locally, “The number of farmers markets in the U.S. increased 54 percent between 2008 and 2011.” Yet despite their popularity, their environmental impacts and health benefits are at best hype and at worst simply not true.
The claim that farmers markets are an environmentally friendly alternative to mass-produced, corporate farming is incredibly shortsighted. Local food enthusiasts, also known as “locavores,” claim that by reducing the amount of fuel used to transport their food, they have managed to curb the environmental impact of food production. As obvious and intuitive as this may sound, it is a very vague and unstable claim to make because there is no universal definition of local among locavores. Some locavores consider food produced up to 400 miles away local.
The type of transportation used to deliver local foods to market is also a varying factoring in the eco-friendliness of eating locally. For example, freight trains are ten times more efficient at moving freight than trucks. If you were to purchase potatoes grown 100 miles away that were shipped via truck, you’d be making the same environmental impact had you chosen potatoes shipped from 1,000 miles away via train. This is a huge variable that does not seem to be taken into account by many local-food enthusiasts.
Buying organic in conjunction with local seems to be the gold standard for most locavores, under the assumption that organic foods are healthier than their nonorganic counterparts. But after conducting two intensive studies regarding the nutritional differences between these two food groups, the Indian Journal of Medical Research stated the following: “Despite an extensive search process which identified more than 92,000 papers, we only found 11 relevant publications that were of extremely variable quality. Our conclusion from this second review is that there is currently no evidence of any nutrition-related health benefits from consuming organic foods.”
Not only have organic foods not been proven to be healthier than nonorganics, they are generally more expensive than nonorganics because they are more labor intensive to produce and are produced at a smaller yield. Thus, increasing the cost of food is a negative effect on consumers and the local economy because the extra money now spent on food could have been saved or spent elsewhere.
The assumption that local farmers markets are saving jobs is yet another fallacy propagated by the local food movement. Asserting that finding more efficient ways of producing food will destroy local jobs is mere conjecture. According to Swedish author and historian Johan Norberg in his 2003 book “In Defense of Global Capitalism,” in pre-19th century Sweden, 80 percent of its population worked in agriculture, but today that figure is around 3 percent. That does not mean that the remaining 77 percent is now employed, but with time that manpower has found its way into other industries, providing us with better housing, clothing, medicines and entertainment.
I am in no way opposed to shopping at the Union Street Farmers Market, nor am I opposed to people freely choosing to purchase locally and organically, but the level of hype surrounding the locally grown food movement is just a passing phase.
T. Emmett Ryan is a Sante Fe political science sophomore. His columns appear Tuesdays.
