Is it possible for an econ professor to commit malpractice?

[Dauphin]

Everything doesn't have to be so black and white. There will be places where it's not practical, but there are also places where it would be perfectly possible for farmers to grow crops but they don't because its cheaper for supermarkets to buy in produce grown on a different continent and ship it over. That is not something you can justify environmentally.

You can. The money you save can be used to plant trees or other environmental projects that outweigh the environmental cost of shipping.

[regexcellent]

Norfolk

I assume you're talking about some Norfolk in Britain and not the one here? Cause pretty much the only thing at the Norfolk here is a bigass navy base, not turkeys...

[kentonio]

My point is, why would someone want their strawberries from Kent and their turkey's from Norfolk, but not care that their car is from Germany and their TV is from Korea.

I suppose people draw a difference between necessities like food and luxury items.

[snoopy369]

Everything doesn't have to be so black and white. There will be places where it's not practical, but there are also places where it would be perfectly possible for farmers to grow crops but they don't because its cheaper for supermarkets to buy in produce grown on a different continent and ship it over. That is not something you can justify environmentally.

It's cheaper because local food production is difficult and/or there is something MORE USEFUL to do with the land. This is called economics 101, and why an economics professor expounding the benefits of locavorism is the equivalent of a nutritionist expounding the benefits of eating all of your meals at McD's.

This isn't a matter of things being black or white. This is a matter of something being truly idiotic. No degree of locavorism makes any sense whatsoever, from an environmental or economic point of view. It's a silly philosophy practiced by silly people who don't think about what they're doing. Things must be taken out to their logical conclusion, and if locavorism is, either it's irrelevant in which case shut up and eat whatever you ****ing want but stop telling others to, or it does SUBSTANTIAL ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL HARM if practiced at a relevant level. There's nothing in between.

[kentonio]

Oh, and what are you eating in January or February in Michigan, exactly? Snow peas? Nope, those aren't really found in the snow, sorry. Winter wheat? Yeah, that's a great diet. Nothing but wheat products three months out of the year. Brilliant. Four thousand years of learning about husbandry, food preservation, and storage, all thrown out the window because some idiot thinks it's a good idea to live like a Native American. **** you, idiot, go live in your grass hut and freeze to death while the rest of us actually have civilization. There are plenty of solutions to global warming and whatnot that have not a single thing to do with idiotic ideas about seasonal eating that were millennia out of date in Cleopatra's time.

That's exactly the argument I wasn't making, well done.

You can. The money you save can be used to plant trees or other environmental projects that outweigh the cost of shipping.

That's exactly what people will do when they save 10p on a bag of apples.

[snoopy369]

Ken, that is exactly the argument that locavores make (again, taken to its logical conclusion). You can make or not make it as you wish, but that's the argument they make, and if you want to defend their argument, you defend this.

And if they could save 10p on a bag of apples grown locally, they would grow them locally. The big bad supermarket isn't importing apples because it's more expensive, or they have some sort of anti-local agenda; it's because they can't find enough apples locally, for cheap enough. Supermarkets around here have local produce all the time when it makes sense, because of what you say - it's cheaper not to ship it from bumf***, andorra, or whatever, than to ship it from a few miles away. But they can't do that all the time, and it's often cheaper to get it from elsewhere, so they do.

[Dauphin]

I assume you're talking about some Norfolk in Britain and not the one here? Cause pretty much the only thing at the Norfolk here is a bigass navy base, not turkeys...

Norfolk, England. Famous for turkey farms.

[Dauphin]

That's exactly the argument I wasn't making, well done.



That's exactly what people will do when they save 10p on a bag of apples.

The choice is i) spending 10p more on a product in the name of reducing environmental impact and ii) spending 10p less and donating some of that saving to a cause that will help the environment more. If you choose the former you are not really being environmentally friendly and are instead being hypocritical or inconsistent.

[Fake Boris]

Let's award the ****** prize to Snoopy.

[Hauldren Collider]

What a scathing and convincing rebuttal, moron.

[Fake Boris]

His posts speak for themselves.

[regexcellent]

snoopy wins the ****ing thread; I have no clue what you're smoking.

[Hauldren Collider]

His posts speak for themselves.

That they do. Yours don't. Therein lies the problem.

[-Jrabbit]

I find it a bit odd that this fairly inconsequential swipe at an econ professor transformed so quickly into an attack on the locavore movement. But whatever; it's Poly.

I go to local farmer's markets because the food is fresh, its chemical content is (allegedly) less, and because I can access unusual varieties, artisinal and free range foods that actually taste better than what I can get at the supermarket. And I do like supporting small family farms - just as I support local (non-chain) merchants when I can.

For me, this has nothing to do with global warming or social responsibility; it's about eating well. When the growing season ends, farm-to-table becomes irrelevant in Chicago.

[snoopy369]

http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/06/06/you-eat-what-you-are-pt-2-full-transcript/

That's the podcast I was talking about. Part 1 has Tyler Cowan vs. Alice Waters, the former being an economist, the latter a chef; and part 2 has the most interesting part. You want evidence, I've got evidence. An unbiased source - someone who was looking FOR evidence of locavorism being environmentally beneficial, or at least assumed he'd find it - found the opposite. Search that page for Glaeser; he showed in his paper that you save less than 1% of the CO2 emissions related to food production by eating locally, in the California food basin. Elsewhere you'd save less, or likely cost - because in other areas, like Michigan or whatnot, you need to spend a lot of energy making the land arable.

His example is tomatoes; it takes about 3x as much CO2 to produce tomatoes in England as it does in Spain, because you have to build a hothouse to grow them in England. This is where the Adam Smith/Ricardo/etc. comes into play; if Chile is better at producing grapes than New Jersey, if it's easier to do so, costs less CO2 by a lot, why shouldn't I eat Chilean grapes? It just doesn't make economic OR environmental sense.

I know that I sound like an extremist here, making an absurd argument - but that's the thing, it's not. It just sounds like it because people (particularly 'modern' yuppie types) have been trained by the media, and by people like Alice Waters, to believe something that has zero basis in fact. You hear 'environmental' and a few things about transportation costs, and think 'oh, that makes sense'. And it does, until you hear the rest of the picture, and realize that you've been feed a load of dung by people who either have a hidden agenda, or people who just don't know what they're talking about. Alice Waters is a perfectly nice person who probably believes what she says, and she makes a lot of sense in many ways - it's good to know your farmer, to know by whom and how your food is produced - but eating locally is just not any sort of solution from any direction.