Eat Local, Degrade the Environment

Eat Local, Degrade the Environment:

“The Locavore’s Dilemma” argues that the benefits of eating local have been vastly overstated by food activists and its serious detriments swept under the rug ..

.. local self-sufficiency is the worst thing you can do for the environment, since it requires many crops to be grown in the wrong places, with damaging ecological consequences. American farmers .. used to grow wheat locally in the Shenandoah Valley, tilling steep and rocky slopes—and unleashing a torrent of soil erosion. With the shift of grain farming to the far more productive and erosion-resistant soils of the Midwest, “more grain is now being produced on fewer acres and, overall, more habitat is available for wildlife.” ..

Famines were common in the past precisely because food security rested on the vagaries of local conditions rather than the resiliency of trade .. “Subsistence farmers periodically starve while commercial agricultural producers who rely on monocultures for their livelihood don’t.”