Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Local burgers worse than chicken from far away

The latest from Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh:
Substituting chicken, fish, or vegetables for red meat just once a week can help combat climate change — even more dramatically than buying locally sourced food, according to scientists in Pennsylvania who studied the environmental impacts of food production and distribution in the United States. The study is scheduled for the May 15 issue of ACS’s bi-weekly journal Environmental Science & Technology.
Full article here.

2 comments:

kgander said...

Or more simply: the peanut butter & jelly sandwich can save the planet: The PB&J Campaign

The paper seems to imply there are advocates of the food-miles metric as the primary measure for reducing one's carbon footprint, which is a position I haven't come across. Most of the arguments I've seen are for substituting local beef rather than distant beef, local produce for distant produce, etc.

And many of the other societal benefits of the practice of "know your food, know your farmer" are completely absent from their calculations.

JBP said...

To think the National Science Foundation funded this drivel.

I am reconsidering my opinion that the NSF is more shielded from political pandering than Congressional Earmarks.

JBP