http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSL0392209120070803

Thanks.

Several economic arguments also demonstrate that local produce may be considered superior for warm-afterglow purposes but is not always so in environmental terms. Tomatoes grown in green houses in the UK are environmentally more damaging than those brought in from Spain. Likewise it has been demonstrated that supermarkets actually reduce pollution by trucking large quantities over long distances than farmers’ markets which see many small shippers carry small produce in their small trucks frequently over small to medium distances.

The problem with these arguments is that they are too complex to be popularly comprehensible. So urban myths thrive in the face of any amount of scientific evidence to the contrary…

Anuradha, globalization of food is seeing a backlash in the US, at least in California as you have correctly divined. Local supermarkets promote locally grown produce. Farmer’s markets are very crowded. Fresher in-season food, typically organic is getting a lot of followers.

Or grow your own if you can. My wife and I both grew up with kitchen gardens and we are now fortunate to have a veggie patch in our backyard. Those veggies, we are absolutely sure, are fresh and have no additives.

The other interesting aspect of this ‘Know your food’ (borrowed from Know your customer!) is that meat-eaters generally will end up eating a more complex cocktail of chemicals since animals are higher up in the food chain than plants. Something for non-veg people to think about.

On the one hand, they are a fascinating study in relative maturity of governance procedures and institutions in the developed nations who rely now on the developing nations for many goods now; on the other, when juxtaposed against stories within the US about product recall due to botulism/ salmonella fears or the UK’s own mad cow disease, they also show that regulatory frameworks are not sufficient, enforcement and monitoring and a functioning and deterring penal system are all essential to ensuring public safety.

In this age of hyper-consumption of information, nearly everything makes headlines. Combine that with low levels of scientific literacy and even lower levels of scientific curiosity, panic is almost guaranteed.

Then again think of how China aims to solve the problem - by executing the head of their FDA-equivalent agency!

PS: Another thing - it is wrong to say that GM is “not tolerated in the EU”. The governance foundations are different but both systems are driven by scientific evidence, even if their risk frameworks differ. Several products are allowed to be grown and are grown in the EU, even as the complex system of directives allows the farming community to declare voluntarily their regions as GM-free. Elected officials cannot take such policy stances unless they can show new evidence of harm by GM crops.

But if we can look at this issue beyond the contamination levels, is this the result of too much of globalization? There is hardly anything local in our consumption and mass scale productions and transportations come with their own hazards. I am waiting for the day when they would announce how packaging material is the most damaging thing on this earth.