When Can Locavores Eat Cheeseburgers?

This morning I got an email from a friend in California. He wrote that he just read an article on the internet that said

by eating an average of 3 cheeseburgers or hamburgers a week, Americans create emissions that exceed the emissons of all the automobiles in America.

My friend was pretty shocked. Can you imagine? he asked.

It is hard to imagine this claim. So I tried to track it down. I found what might be the "parent" article for the idea. I'm going to go out on a limb and refer you to The Cheeseburger Footprint by Jamais Cascio. After some sophisticated analysis using reliable data, he shows that

the greenhouse gas emissions arising every year from the production and consumption of cheeseburgers is roughly the amount emitted by 6.5 million to 19.6 million SUVs. There are now approximately 16 million SUVs currently on the road in the US.

Mr. Cascio says that the real point of the analysis

...is about how we live our lives, and the recognition that every action we take, even the most prosaic, can have unexpectedly profound consequences. The article was meant to poke us in our collective ribs, waking us up to the effects of our choices.

And that's what locavore is all about. You may be as amazed as I to learn that the word "locavore" (sometimes spelled "localvore") was the New Oxford American Dictionary 2007 word of the year. A locavore encourages people to grow or gather their own food; to buy from local farmers' markets. A locavore is conscious of the carbon footprint of the food s/he eats. Without getting too precise, a locavore will probably apply estimates of transportation costs as well as fat calorie counts as criteria for choosing between two or more products.

Obviously, the closer the food is produced to your home, the less energy it is going to take to get that food to you. Another intuitively obvious, but nonetheless often overlooked, fact is that eating locally is good for the local economy. In Ten Reasons to Eat Local Food, the author cites a study by the New Economics Foundation (London) that found

that a dollar spent locally generates twice as much income for the local economy. When businesses are not owned locally, money leaves the community at every transaction.

What is less obvious, is that locally produced may trump organically produced when environmental considerations are uppermost.

In a March 2005 study by the journal Food Policy, it was found that the miles that organic food often travels to our plate creates environmental damage that outweighs the benefit of buying organic.

(An astute reader will catch the caveat in that statement. If the organic food doesn't travel, then by all means, choose organic over non-organic!)

So, a locavore can clearly eat a cheeseburger when the family cow has produced the milk for the cheese and as well as the burger!