NewScientist’s Michael Le Page tramples all over the toes of the organic food movement in his concern for climate change (issue 3 December 2016, paywall):
You might think buying local food is always preferable to imported food when it comes to carbon emissions, but even this is not a reliable guide. Food flown thousands of miles can still have a much lower carbon footprint than, say, local produce grown in heated greenhouses.
The one label you’re likely to find on many food items is the “organic” one. But if you care about the environment, don’t buy it (it’s not healthier either, but that’s another story).
For starters, you are not helping wildlife. Yes, organic farms host a greater diversity of wildlife than conventional ones. But because the yields are lower, organic farms require more land, which in the tropics often means cutting down more rainforests.
And organic food also results in higher greenhouse gas emissions than conventional farming.
The trouble is, there is no way to tell whether that basic loaf of bread is better in terms of greenhouse emissions than the organic one sitting next to it on the supermarket shelf.
And since the organic movement has rejected GMOs, Michael consigns the various organic food movements to the dustbin of history. What does Michael want, if he can’t have GMOs?
What we really need are climate labels on foods, so consumers can see whether, say, gene-edited bread is far better in climate terms than organic bread. This isn’t going to be easy. Measuring all the emissions associated with producing food and getting it onto a supermarket shelf is extremely complex, not to say expensive. Most schemes so far have foundered. Tesco tried introducing its own carbon labelling in 2007, for instance, but eventually abandoned the idea.
And it’s pointless unless the labels are easy to follow. One promising proposal is to describe the greenhouse emissions associated with particular food items in terms of what percentage of a person’s typical daily carbon footprint they represent.
Climate labelling is definitely worth pursuing despite the challenges. The only alternative is to allow consumers to continue being hoodwinked by feel-good mumbo jumbo – and the stakes are far too high to let this happen.
Perhaps not the most diplomatic of approaches – but sometimes the best diplomacy is to just lay your cards out and dare a rejoinder. It makes me wonder why I didn’t think of climate labels, although it’s not obvious that American consumers would pay much attention to them. As Michael notes, the proper metric (designed to alarm and motivate the informed consumer) is not immediately apparent; no doubt the cited proposal will be rejected since it doesn’t use a target level of emissions. And a target level of emissions will lead to pitched political battles between those who think they are too high and those who question the need for their very existence. Whether or not this will go anywhere is not immediately clear.
(Tesco, mentioned in the article, is a British grocer, apparently with an advanced social conscience.)
