Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly

Nations that lack strict environmental regulations (mostly poor nations) often become “pollution havens” for wealthy multinational corporations. In this sense, the lack of environmental laws in poor countries represents a hidden environmental subsidy that enables the big guys to come in, produce goods on the cheap, foist the externalities onto the

To reiterate, the most important reason that trade relationships must be nurtured is that trade produces wealth and wealthy nations are, without exception, environmentalist nations.

The flip side to this axiom is that poverty perpetuates environmental degradation.

swallowing whole a bumper-sticker mantra—eat local, buy organic, support fair trade, damn Frankenfoods—without fully examining the effect of universalizing these impassioned imperatives.

evaluated (at 11 percent),

production and processing account for 45.6 percent of the fossil fuel usage, restaurant preparation takes up another 15.8 percent, and home preparation sucks up a whopping 25 percent of the overall energy used to produce and consume food made in the United States.

Right now less than 2 percent of the U.S. population provides our food. Even if that number expanded by a factor of five—an occupational shift without precedent—we’d have nowhere near enough growers for a relocalized food supply.

Do you really want a local cannery?

storage systems that are energy-efficient, and sustainable home kitchens and cooking habits. We should also support agricultural practices that reduce land dedicated to food production (while increasing yield and fostering wilderness preservation), recycle safe agricultural waste back into the land, and reduce the number of farm animals clogging ag

sanctioned program of trade would systematically underscore the power of the hub-and-spoke logic, rewarding producers who locate their operations in areas where the environmental conditions are most appropriate