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Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

> At the end of the day this is signalling. We all know that the best thing we can do is eat a local, veg-friendly (vegetarian/vegan) diet.

Local doesn’t belong in there. As a reductio ad absurdum would it be better to eat a diet of nothing but imported NZ lamb or to grow all food locally at McMurdo Base in Antarctica? Grass is next to free. Ocean shipping is the most efficient means of transport for bulk freight there is. To grow food at McMurdo you’d need to heat the environment, insulate it and light it half the year.

Eat local is class signaling, not environmentalism.

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"What about Antarctica" is the most straw man argument possible when talking about food sourcing.

What about the space station? Shipping is expensive, but the real estate for farming is even more expensive.

(Growing some CO2 removers in the space station would be a interesting idea. The 'Space nab' project. Sounds great ;-))

Until the plants catch fire and then the ship's computer is all "Negative Capa, five lifeforms"

As a more realistic example, I think you can buy locally grown tomatoes in Finland all year round these days, or if not at least pretty close to it. A large portion of them are grown in Närpes, where day length dips below 5 hours in December. Keeping those greenhouses lit and warm is in no way ecological.

The guys in Närpes has an impressive thing going, but they're simply an excellent example on how you can produce things locally if you have a lot of space and cheap electricity available. That doesn't automatically mean it's more efficient in regards to CO2 emission, so you're pretty much proving the grandparent's point; they could probably grow food on Antarctica too.

Almost all power plants waste huge amounts of low grade waste heat (typically ~90C water), fossil fuel plants also give off considerable amounts of CO2 which can be used to enrich the atmosphere of a greenhouse. It's a shame there isn't more joined up thinking when these things are planned.

Don't forget places like Chad and Niger. Antartica is, as the parent post said, a reductio ad absurdum, but I often pay attention to how global warming (or even just bad years and seasons) affects agriculture and animal husbandry in places like Chad and Niger because it's a forewarning of what might happen to the north of Nigeria (the north is our breadbasket). We also import grain from places that are now having bad season after bad season and it does affect.

If, in the near future, food transportation relies on mostly clean or renewable energy, then it shouldn't be unsustainable to grow and import our pearl millet from a different country or even continent. It would also promote trade, which is sometimes desperately needed.

As long as the methods of production and transportation are sustainable and environmentally friendly, what would the issue be?

That's not strictly true. Eating (extremely) locally has lower costs with regards to at least packaging and transportation. As an added benefit eating in-season foods means that industry, regardless of size will conform to a cheaper form of growth and cropping.

What you said isn't strictly true either. Transporting a train load of food across the country emits less CO2 per unit than a farmer driving a van load of their produce to a farmer's market. Scale drives down price and emissions.

> Eat local is class signaling, not environmentalism.

It's true, but it shouldn't be applied litterally either. It's perfectly reasonable to consume locally produced and cheaply available food and it's quite logical to encourage local production assuming it is financially viable and results in a reduction in total CO2 emissions.

I can imagine it could even result in increased meat consumption for a few select individuals living in areas where agriculture isn't viable.

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