Why Eating Local Isn’t a Climate Solution

Among the most popular bits of advice for those seeking to reduce their carbon footprint is to “eat local.” But unfortunately, eating local is not a climate solution that packs much of a punch. When it comes to lessening food’s climate impact, it’s almost entirely about eating less meat and more plants — not where those plants and meat come from.

“If you want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food, focus on the types of foods you’re eating, and not how far they’ve traveled to get to you,” Chloë Waterman, senior program manager for Friends of the Earth’s Climate-Friendly Food Program, tells Sentient. “You’re not going to reduce the carbon footprint of your foods very much by eating locally, in most cases.”

Around a third of all greenhouse gas emissions comes from food production. And most of that climate impact is thanks to meat — specifically, beef. In other words, the carbon footprint of food has much less to do with emissions from transportation than the resources — cows and land — needed to produce meat to begin with.

This isn’t to say that eating locally produced food is bad. It’s not, and as we’ll see, eating locally can be beneficial in other ways. But strictly from the standpoint of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, eating local food isn’t a powerful climate solution — at least not on its own.

Why Should We Care About Food Emissions to Begin With?

Although locally produced food isn’t the answer to rapidly rising global temperatures, the focus on food in general isn’t misplaced, as food production is an enormous contributor to global carbon emissions — and habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and a number of other negative environmental impacts.

At least 26 percent or more of global greenhouse gas emissions are the result of food production (and some studies have found as much as a third). There are other environmental impacts to consider too. Agricultural production gobbles up 70 percent of the planet’s freshwater and occupies half of all habitable land on Earth. Agricultural expansion is a leading cause of species extinction worldwide. Livestock farms pollute the water and erode the soil, which poisons local aquatic life and increases the risk of flooding to local communities. This article is focused on emissions, but there are impacts to workers, communities and farm animals to consider too.

It’s clear that if we’re going to keep our planet livable for future generations, something about our food systems needs to change. But simply “eating local” isn’t the answer, and there are two main reasons why.

Why Transportation Isn’t the Issue

First and foremost, transportation only accounts for a small fraction of food-related emissions — some research puts this between six and 10 percent, though estimates vary depending on the food type. As such, focusing heavily on food transportation as an emissions-reduction strategy is misguided, because the impact is just so small.

This is especially true when it comes to meat, which has a much larger carbon footprint than other foods. Out of all the greenhouse gasses associated with beef production, for instance, less than two percent of them come from transporting that beef to your plate.

Where Food-Related Emissions Really Come From

The overwhelming majority of food-related emissions comes from the farms themselves. Animal farms are prolific emitters of methane and nitrous oxide, two potent greenhouse gasses, and other harmful gases like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. 

“The emissions associated with growing and producing foods — what are called pre-farm gate emissions — are much, much greater than emissions associated with transportation,” Waterman says. 

This is true, by the way, whether we’re talking about a factory farm or a small cattle ranch or independent dairy. Buying your meat from a local organic or regenerative farm does not lower its emissions. The opposite is true, in fact (see this explainer on ‘less meat, better meat’ to understand why), as factory farms are more climate-efficient if we’re comparing the same type of meat produced (beef from a feedlot versus a regenerative cattle ranch, for instance). Again, we’re just talking about emissions here, not water pollution or how animals are treated or any other metric.

Back to the beef. It’s not just cows belching methane, but also the vast quantity of land (a whopping 80 percent of all agricultural land) that goes towards feeding these animals, both pasture and land used to grow feed crops like soy and corn. 

Land — especially the uncultivated kind like a peat bog or a shrubby savanna — is a valuable climate resource, because these types of landscapes are very good at storing carbon and keeping it out of the atmosphere. And that in turn helps to offset the emissions we humans are constantly pumping out into the atmosphere. On top of that, whenever humans cut down a forest or other wild landscape to use it for farming, the land stops storing carbon, and we humans lose out on the opportunity to store carbon into the future too. 

Scientists call this a carbon opportunity cost, and have been working on assigning an emissions number for these costs for foods like beef for years in order to make the steep climate cost of continuing to eat beef — a leading driver of deforestation — more clear.

Local Isn’t Always Better

Locally produced food is often associated with small, family-owned farms, and eating local is sometimes presented as a way to redirect your food dollars from corporate behemoths to local families and communities. 

“I think what most people are looking for when they’re thinking about local [food] is, how do they support the small businesses and the food and farming community, not massive agriculture corporations that happen to have a location where you live?,” Waterman says. 

But “local” does not always mean “family-owned” — a fraught term in its own right as there are plenty of family-owned businesses that are also corporations. Local doesn’t necessarily mean “independently owned,” “small,” or “non-corporate,” and it doesn’t automatically say anything about either the working conditions of the employees or the living conditions of the animals.

It’s About What You Eat, Not How It Got There

As Waterman points out, the type of food you eat is much more important than how far away from you it was produced, insofar as carbon emissions go. And on this point, the data is unambiguous: The best way to reduce the carbon footprint of your diet is to eat less meat and dairy, and more plants.

We all need protein, but producing meat emits far more greenhouse gas emissions on a per-gram basis than non-meat proteins. Beef is far and away the worst offender in this regard: Producing enough beef to provide 100 grams of protein emits a huge amount — 49.89kg of CO2-eq. That’s more than twice the emissions of any other protein, other types of meat included. 

By contrast, producing 100 grams of protein from tofu releases only 1.98kg of CO2-eq into the air. Rice, wheat and rye all emit less than 7kg of CO2-eq, and peas only release .44kg, making them over 113 times more environmentally friendly than beef from a carbon emissions standpoint.

“Are you buying fruits, vegetables, grains, generally plant-based foods that are lower on the food chain and have less emissions?,” Waterman says. “Or are you buying beef, chicken, pork products, dairy that are just going to have higher emissions, local or not? Because those foods are so much more resource intensive to produce.”

Yes, There Can Be Some Benefits of Eating Locally

With all of that being said, eating local food can be beneficial in ways unrelated to carbon emissions (and if it helps you eat more plants, it’s good for that too).

Waterman cites resiliency as one such benefit: Buying from local food sources strengthens regional food supply chains, and this can act as a bulwark against unexpected shocks to the national food supply.

“If you’re eating locally, you’re supporting the build-out of local and regional food supply chains that might be shorter, and less subject to disruptions that may result from climate-related disasters, or things like the COVID-19 pandemic,” Waterman says.

And although not all local farms are small and family-owned, plenty are just that, and patronizing them can be a great way to funnel money back into your own community. Plus, if buying local gets you to eat more plants instead of meat, that is, in fact, a win for climate. Finally, as anybody who’s been to a farmer’s market can tell you, local food is often simply tastier than the alternative.

There are, in other words, plenty of reasons to consider buying food that was made relatively close to where you live. But if the goal is to reduce your carbon emissions, eating locally produced food alone simply doesn’t do it.