Nonfiction review: Just Food

NONFICTION It might never be the subject of a summer blockbuster, but at a glance the ongoing fight over what you eat reads like a Hollywood script.

Act One: The villain -- global warming -- enters in a black shroud. The premise: Our voracious appetite for fossil fuels threatens to overheat the globe, with disastrous results. (Cue "The Day after Tomorrow" trailer.)

Act Two: The good guys -- the little green men, or rather, the environmentalists -- show up to save the planet. Among them are locavores, who encourage us to eat food grown close to home. Their reasoning: The more miles food has to travel before reaching our plate, the greater its impact on global warming.

For a moment, the world seems set to be saved. Then the third act begins: The locavores are wrong. Or at least that's what James E. McWilliams argues, convincingly, in "Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly."

The locavores' emphasis on food miles is understandable, McWilliams acknowledges. "It's an elegantly simple measure of environmental consciousness, has the benefit of being easy to understand, and requires one and only one basic change in behavior: reduce food miles."

But the locavores' position is akin to an obese man expecting to slim down simply by leaving the half-and-half out of his daily cup of coffee, writes McWilliams, an associate professor of history at Texas Sate UniversitySan Marcos and a recent fellow in the Agrarian Studies program at Yale University.

"Food miles are the half-and-half in our coffee; in reducing them, we make little progress toward the ultimate goal of sustainable production," McWilliams writes.

In fact, studies have shown that travel accounts for the least energy consumption in the process -- 11 percent, according to one study. The same study found that production and processing account for 45.6 percent of energy consumption associated with food, "and home preparation sucks up a whopping 25 percent of the overall energy used to produce and consume food made in the United States," McWilliams writes.

What does that mean for consumers? Worry less about how far food travels and concentrate instead on how efficiently it's produced.

Consider the winter tomato. "Winter tomatoes that originate in Spain and travel to England obviously cover more miles than British tomatoes to go from farm to fork, but mainly because of the fact that so many British tomatoes are hothouse-grown (which can take up to ten times more energy), Spanish tomatoes are more energy-efficient in the aggregate," McWilliams writes.

The reason is simple. Shipping tomatoes by the thousands from Spain to England so dramatically lowers the environmental impact of an individual tomato's food miles that it outweighs the benefits offered by the short distance traveled by the locally grown tomato (which is typically shipped in smaller numbers).

Likewise, London foodies would be acting more responsibly if they ate grass-fed lamb from New Zealand rather than grain-fed lamb raised near home at a higher energy cost, McWilliams writes. Even better: Skip the lamb altogether or enjoy it sparingly, as if it were caviar.

"To be perfectly blunt, if the world continues to eat meat at current rates, there's simply no way to achieve truly sustainable food production," writes McWilliams, who became a vegetarian while writing "Just Food" -- a tall achievement for a Texan.

Answering the larger question behind McWilliams' book -- how do we grow enough food to feed the world's growing population without destroying the environment? -- doesn't end with vegetarianism and calculating food's energy costs.

He cautiously advocates the use of genetically modified crops, which can reduce pesticide usage and increase yields, for example. And he argues that our main source of animal protein should be farm-raised fish, while forgoing "any fish farmed in nations with lax environmental standards (such as China), all farmed salmon and shrimp, and any fish deemed 'Avoid' by groups such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Blue Ocean Institute."

Feeding the world with the environment in mind is more complicated than a summer blockbuster, but given the stakes, it's just as scary. Let's hope it has a happy ending.

Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at www.thewag.net.