Diff for "LocavoresDilemma"

The Localvore's Dilemma

• Pierre Desrochers, Hiroko Shimizu 2012 PublicAffairs Books

Reading Notes (not a review)

Well presented polemic. I agree with almost everything in the book. However, tables and charts would help me propagate the ideas to other geeks. Sometimes a picture is more convincing than words. This book will change few minds, though it is important and well reasoned - the book that actually changes minds will persuade those who disagree, not the already-persuaded (like me).

Any book about food should discuss nutrition and palatability specifically. My fresh garden vegetables taste better than storebought (an unsubstantiated opinion not based on double-blind testing), an opinion shared by many gardeners.

Local Oregon strawberries (especially the Hood variety) are high sugar and ship and store poorly. They are probably also dripping with pesticides. The imported California varieties are big and flavorless - easily machine picked, and "durable". This is an opportunity for research and genetic engineering - a Hood successor that could grow in more places, last two weeks rather than 4 days, and shipping techniques that could move intact berries around the world, would greatly increase the value and range of the crop. Global trade could pay for the research.

Annoying page headings, chapter numbers in notes, etc -

• Prefer chapter names in page headers of text
• Notes should also use chapter name, not just chapter number
• Notes pages should have header "notes for pages xxx to xxx"
  • This is a little more work, but makes revisions more accurate and checking easier
• For example, the accidental addition of note 49 to the chapter 5 notes offsets all the subsequent note numbers, so that note 50 is actually 49 in the text, note 51 is text 50, and so on to the end of the chapter, where note 80 is text 79.

Food miles - more fuel used getting green beans from Kenya to the UK than from market to home

• < 4% of fuel used for long distance transportation, most spent on production, esp. heated greenhouses

Some actual numbers on fuel consumption per ton-mile for various modes would be helpful

Land use: C. Reick, T. Raddatz, J. Pongratz, and M. Claussen, 2009: Contribution of anthropogenic land cover change emissions to pre-industrial atmospheric CO2, Tellus, doi:10.1111/j.1600-0889.2010.00479.x.

Page 138: "( Of course, carbon dioxide is also plant food, and, as such, higher concentrations of this gas should ultimately prove beneficial for agricultural production, but we will not address this issue here.)"

• This is not an "issue" - it is simply wrong. Plants consume sunlight, and CO2, and water, and trace nutrients, in the right proportions. Most C4 angiosperms have ample CO2, and are missing the other inputs, which are not provided in abundance year-round by the atmosphere. Indeed, plant roots respire; fueled by soil oxygen and sap from leaves above the ground, they draw water from the soil and pump it up the stem. They produce CO2 below the ground in far higher concentrations than in the above-ground atmosphere. The roots also exchange carbonate for mineral phosphorus and potassium in rock and soil. Prior to artificial fertilization, this was the principal source of trace nutrients for deep-rooted plants.

Reducing land use with efficient crops is a Real Good Idea, because more land can revert to wild, high CO2 sequestering species. Developing crops with reduced need for artificial fertilization is better, because we are using up the low-cost mineral sources. Hopefully we can gene-engineer low-fertilization cultivars faster than we deplete mineral feedstock for fertilizer.