I'VE been feeling pretty smug lately about zipping over to the farmers' market or the local Whole Foods for some New York apples or New Jersey spinach and ferrying it home in my reusable grocery bags.

Take that, petrochemical cabal!

I'm not the only one feeling so righteous. Unless you have been stuck in the processed-food aisles of your local grocery store for the last couple of years, you have probably noticed that local food is all the rage.

Union Square in Manhattan may offer one of the most popular farmers' markets, but Des Moines isn't far behind, and top restaurants and college campuses are now demanding local food on the plate.

Books and magazines about local food are selling big, too.

Barbara Kingsolver ate locally produced food on her Virginia farm and wrote a best-selling book about it. So did Michael Pollan, who bagged a wild pig and grubbed for mushrooms in Northern California in a quest for the perfect meal (and readers).

And then there was the Brooklyn guy who turned his entire backyard into a miniature farm complete with corn stalks and a chicken coop, and wrote about it in New York magazine. Slaughtered chickens and fresh eggs in Flatbush? How cool is that?

The local food, or locavore, movement has so much momentum that some of the food glitterati have declared that such food is better than organic.

But now comes a team of researchers from the University of California, Davis, who have started asking provocative questions about the carbon footprint of food. Those questions threaten to undermine some of the feel-good locavore story line, not to mention my weekend forays for produce. (A carbon footprint is a measure of the impact of human activities on the environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced.)

While the research is not yet complete, Tom Tomich, director of the University of California Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, said the fact that something is local doesn't necessarily mean that it is better, environmentally speaking.

The distance that food travels from farm to plate is certainly important, he says, but so is how food is packaged, how it is grown, how it is processed and how it is transported to market.

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/business/yourmoney/09feed.html?_
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