Economics and counter-inutitive conclusions

Now I'm not exactly always in agreement with Lews when he goes off on one of his ScFi, flying car or selective misuse of statistics trips. However, in this general area, there is, indeed a lot of counter-intuitive stuff. I'd agree whole heartedly that the whole "food miles" thing is wildly misused and misleading. For instance, the Supermarkets get hammered for their use of centralised depots and bulk distribution. However, if you start looking at the actual fuel used compared to local distribution and the fact that local distribution requires very large numbers of short journeys with vehicles less than optimally loaded, the supermarket distribution model is often far more fuel efficient. After all, fuel costs money - it is in the supermarkets interests to optimise transport costs, of which fuel is a very large part (of course there is a fuel cost issue with people travelling by car to centralised supermarkets, but that's a ratgher different matter).

Then there is the kicking the supermarkets get for generating excessive waste. However, again, it's not in the supermarkets interests to generate waste. They have very sophisticated ways of managing stocks and demands and modern food preservation systems (including freezing) are far less wasteful than the techniques of the past (which truly did have much loss of food due to spoiling, pests and so on). it's funadamentally impossible to avoid some food wastage, and the wider and better the choice to consumers, then the higher that will be. But there are still ways of dealing with it - unused food can be used in other parts of the food chain (such as animial feed), or even in anaerobic digesters.

As for food miles - adding up the total mileage travelled by the food on your plate makes absolutely no sense at all. Does that sprinkle of pepper from Asia suddenly add 6,000 miles? Of course not - it's the total energy input that matters, which is a far more relevant measure. It's also a measure that can very neatly get wrapped up in the costs of transportation. Fill a refrigerated ship with frozen good, and the energy input per Kg-mile involved in transportation is tiny. Drive to your local supermarket for a packet of asparagaus and that same number is huge.

The lesson on all this is to use economics to change behaviour. It is, for instance, completely ridiculous to tax 4WD vehice owners just for posession. What you want to do is tax the usage of fuel, something which fuel duty does very well.

Of course many of the fantics in this area want to micro-manage people's lives with often, counter-productive advice (or maybe orders might be a better way). For instance, those boxes of organic vegetables delivered to your doorstep via a local farmer are very likely to have used more energy, and involved more wastage, than the same goods delivered by a supermarket.