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“Pollan makes much of the energy costs incurred by the long food-supply chains of American grocery stores. It may look like we are eating Chilean grapes, he argues, but in fact, once we consider transportation costs, we are guzzling petroleum.
This isn’t the last word, of course. Economists are prone to assume that the product being shipped is like a bunch of unbreakable billiard balls. Farmer/researcher Frederick Kirschenmann, writing in the Science and Environmental Health newsletter, “The Networker,” suspects that long-distance food may be one of the reasons why fruits, vegetables, and wheat have declined five to thirty-five percent in nutritional value in the last fifty years: “While fruit and vegetables may be genetically altered to retain their appearance during this long trip, vitamins are lost over time and protein breaks down. So the trip not only adds a ‘fuel tax’ to the cost of food, it may also deliver food with reduced nutritional value.”
