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I'm currently writing a paper about how shopping local and sustainably will reduce fossil fuel consumption by astounding amounts. What I've written so far is a rough idea of the problem the current systems have. Since I know that Fupeople tend to have real lives behind the computer, despite their best efforts, I would like for any who work in or with these fields to drop some inpunt from time to time when they get the chance.
Thank you in advance, James
Using fossil fuels as our primary fuel source for producing equipment, and for using harvesting, production and transportation equipment has been knocked pretty roughly in the last few years, and rightly so. Larger vehicles produce larger emissions, and longer trips produce longer emissions output times. Longer trips with larger equipment can also get to be expensive, but not just for the producer, this will affect the consumer as well.
There is no doubting that by buying local, one can save money on the cost of your transport, but for a long time, buying local meant buying organic. Buying organic meant to me that I could not save money on the food that I bought, as organics are expensive back home in Northern California, so saving money by buying locally was a misnomer. It was actually cheaper for me to drive another few miles into town, go to the local Safeway and see what the produce section had to offer me and prices far lower than those of farmer’s markets and roadside vegetable stands.
The problem, it seems to me, is that we produce so much food in such concentrated areas, and for such specific things, that we cannot help but to have to send our stuff off to other parts of the country, or even other parts of the world, just to get it where the demand is. The creation of this problem has given us an unintended consequence of high rates of fossil fuel use that foul up our air and water and would otherwise be non-existent if we had a system that was designed to keep food local and sustainable.
