Behind the TimesSelect wall, The New York Times features an excellent post by Richard Conniff:
A lot of people have begun to lose their appetite lately at the thought that their food travels, on average, 1,500 miles from farmer to dinner plate. Buying, instead, from local farmers looks increasingly appealing: We get fresher produce (and benediction from Alice Waters), while also preserving open space and protecting local jobs.
But what’s really lifted the “buy local” movement out of the foodie realm and into general public awareness is fear of climate change: It suddenly seems dangerously profligate that we spend 36 calories of fossil fuel energy transporting one calorie of California lettuce to a consumer in New York. Likewise that apples in a New England supermarket come from New Zealand, or potatoes in Ireland from Cyprus, or flowers in the Netherlands from Kenya. Carrying carbon to Newcastle seems to be among the chief functions of modern international trade.
So my first reaction was to think that buying local makes a lot of sense. And if it’s true for food, what about the pots we cook that food in, or the furniture we sit on, or the cars we drive to the supermarket? When does “Buy American” morph from jingoism to progressivism?
And yet buying local may not be the simple answer we’re looking for. For starters, it’s more likely to hurt American farmers than help them. Agriculture is one area where the United States still enjoys a trade surplus, amounting to $5.66 billion last year. But the “buy local” movement is strongest in Europe, where it got its start, and American agricultural products feature prominently among the targets.
[...]
So where does all this leave the individual shopper trying to make good choices? Tesco, Britain’s largest retailer, is now working to put a “carbon label” on every product it sells. Instead of the comfortable illusion of environmentalism provided by the “buy local” idea, this label will detail the actual global warming cost of a product. And that will probably show that it makes sense to buy that compact fluorescent lightbulb, even if it was made in China.
[...]
Beneath the surface, the urge to buy local is often just a disguised version of the urge to punish someone foreign. [Emphasis added.]
