Oregon man ends local-food quest

SALEM, Ore. – A Salem man has called off a yearlong attempt to eat only foods grown locally because he says he was adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by driving around the state to shop.

“I felt like I was doing it for the wrong reasons in the end,” Justin Rothboeck said. “I was doing it more out of a sense of guilt than actually enjoying it.”

With four months to go on his quest, the 26-year-old law student and former vegan quit trying to eat only food grown, processed and sold in Oregon and Washington.

The early end to his experiment illustrates the problem that advocates of local food face in their effort to bring consumers fresher, more nutritional food that is easier on the environment because it reduces carbon emissions for transportation.

Rothboeck said he realized that by driving all over the Willamette Valley to find local food, he likely spewed more carbon than his local diet was preventing.

“There is an inherent assumption that when you shorten the amount of miles the food traveled that you reduce your carbon footprint,” said Deborah Kane, vice president of the Food and Farms program at Portland-based Ecotrust.

“It is so oversimplified. The amount of fossil fuel burned to fill your grocery store with products is nothing at all compared to fossil fuels burned by shoppers bringing food home.”

Rothboeck helped some people reconnect with locally grown food, according to followers of his experiment who commented on his blog.

He helped point out the many issues that eating locally brings up: food security, transportation and carbon emissions, lost knowledge of food seasonality and how food is grown, industrial growers versus family farmers, and dollars spent on marketing versus production.