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

evaluated (at 11 percent),

He argued quite convincingly that the land needed to graze 100 million grass-fed cattle could be made available if we converted land that is now exploited to grow feed into grassland.

overall fuel consumption could be reduced by an enormous fifteen times if fishers used a seine instead of a beam trawl to catch fish.

The sun powers the growth of aquatic plants, algae, phytoplankton, and bacteria that feed on nutrient-rich water to create the nutritional foundation of an aquatic habitat. The next stage involves “algal grazers” and phytoplankton consumers called zooplankton. These barely visible organisms prevent the foundation of the system—algae and related org

Studies of rice have found that organic production in California yields 50 to 70 percent of conventional production, while organic corn yields are two thirds of conventional. Organic tomatoes demand six to ten times the land required for conventional tomatoes and use twice the energy to produce. When the Rodale Institute, an organization explicitly

energy needed to produce meat is so high that if the average meat eater in Australia reduced his or her meat consumption by half, the saved energy would be enough to run that household for an entire month.

the most common biotech cultivars being planted—corn, cotton, soybeans, and virus-resistant papaya and squash—were solely responsible for a national pesticide reduction of 46 million pounds. The study praised this figure but also noted that if planters consistently planted the thirty other available GM cultivars, they could cut pesticide use by ano

means meeting our present-day needs without denying future generations the right to do the same,

to the fetish of localism. Third I’ll elaborate on how the unintended consequences of perpetuating an “eat local” brand—consequences that can be cynically populist, isolationist, and protectionist—have hollowed out the movement’s core and exposed the brand to the most dangerous kind of corporate exploitation. Finally, I’ll sketch out another model