Food For Thought: US Squanders Energy On Food Chain “Accounting
for energy use in agriculture is very complex,” says Miguel
Gomez, an assistant professor at Cornell’s Dyson School of
Applied Economics. “We’ve done studies that look at these huge
farms with irrigation and transportation, and compared them with
more localized food supply chains, and in terms of energy use it
is not clear which one is more efficient.” While new heat
retention technologies that use solar power and compost to warm
greenhouses may eventually give local farms the energy upper
hand, a more immediate solution (from an environmental
perspective) to reduce energy consumption may be to change the
way we eat. In his food-miles paper, Webernotes that red meat is
about 150 percent more intensive on green house gas emissions
than chicken or fish. “Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can
be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s
food-related climate footprint than ‘buying local,’” he writes.
“Shifting less than one day per