Zoe Weichert Mr. Daly AP Language, 2nd Hour 10 February, 2023 Locavore Movement: Feasible or Impractical? In many places across the globe, there are communities of people rallying troops to join the locavore movement. This movement is set in place so that members of communities can band together to eat locally. Locally, though, has a different meaning to each person, community, and nation on the globe, so it can be difficult to come to a consensus on what eating locally really includes. On each side of the locavore debate, there are positives and negatives about whether this is truly a movement that is helpful to both the economy and the earth itself. Although the mere idea of the movement is honorable, in the grand scheme of the issues at …show more content…
Transportation is not the only way that food leaves a carbon footprint though. In reality, according to Source C (2009), which addresses the topic of the locavore movement, out of everything involved in food’s total carbon footprint, transportation only makes up 11 percent. This leaves 89 percent of the carbon footprint to just being cooked in the kitchen or being wasted and thrown out after people didn’t like the meal, or forgot to use it. Majority of food’s carbon footprint is due to careless human mistakes, rather than the locavore’s belief of it being mainly from transportation. Locavores also have the mistake of wrongly calculating food miles. “...a shipper sending a truck with 2,000 apples over 2,000 miles would consume the same amount of fuel per apple as a local farmer who takes a pickup 50 miles to sell 50 apples…” (Source C, 2009). No matter where food is coming from, it’s going to take fuel and gas emissions to get it to where it needs to go. When only buying from local farms, it can hurt the large ones that help the economy by trading and shipping to other countries. Small farms have less food to sell at whatever distance they are traveling compared to a large corporation selling much more food at, what could be, the same distance. More supply calls for more demand which helps boost the economy and keep it steady. Before becoming a locavore, people need to look deeper into details like the carbon footprint of food and realize that no matter where it comes from, it will still have