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[jillybean74]

Apparently it matters more what you eat than where it comes from.
So I wonder if buying homegrown beef helps, and how much?  My parents' beef is mostly raised on grass, which I think makes a big difference in terms of the greenhouse gas cost.  But the cows would still fart methane.

They also point out that sometimes eating locally requires more

Comments

[jillybean74]

I am curious who funded this latest study
Someone always has to fund a study. It's more important in critiquing a study to look at the methodology (which of course is not delved into in the article) than who funded it. All organizations have some kind of vested interest, and one can't discount results just because of who funded it.

but I think the ones above make sense and are fairly easy to implement
I guess the point is that it's not really as simple as everyone thinks. For example, reading something like this no longer makes me confident that buying apples from BC is more environmentally friendly than buying them from NZ, especially if only 4% of the emissions are from transport. Maybe in the winter/spring, one should be buying NZ apples because BC apples at that time of year would be refridgerated since the previous fall, possibly generating more emissions than transporting them from NZ

[tblumens]

I agree that this attitude is problematic.
On the transport issue, apparently it's better, in terms of emissions, to raise lamb in New Zealand and ship them to the UK...
And the freezer argument doesn't work: if you're going to store lots of food from the summer, you'll need a bigger freezer, which will use more energy than a smaller freezer. Not to mention that when you put something that's not frozen into your freezer, it has to use more energy to freeze it. The more you freeze, the more energy you use.
It's similar to saying that it doesn't matter buying local or not, because the strawberries have been shipped anyway, and if you don't buy them, someone else will...
Of course, if you don't want to eat meat and potatoes for half of the year, you need to compare the amount of greenhouse gases generated by each method, and it's very likely that the freezer will be more efficient. But the cost will not be zero.