A Study Says Growing Your Own Food Is “Bad for the Climate.” Here’s Why They’re Wrong.
by Marie Hawthorne
Important news: growing your own food is bad for the climate. Leave it to the experts if you love the planet.
Ever notice how we’re not supposed to respond to any of our current crises by learning and bettering ourselves? We weren’t supposed to confront Covid with the conviction to improve our health through diet and exercise. We were just supposed to follow CDC guidelines. We weren’t supposed to ask difficult questions about how war in Ukraine could have been avoided. We were just supposed to accept whatever legacy media told us.
And now it turns out that we are not supposed to address environmental concerns by shortening our food chains and lessening our reliance on complex transportation systems.
Didn’t you hear? Growing your own food is bad for the climate.
Grow flowers, not food.
In what might be the stupidest article I’ve ever read, a new study from the University of Michigan announced that growing your own food in urban settings can emit five times as much carbon as those grown in “conventional” settings. Scientists say that the emissions don’t come from the vegetables themselves but from infrastructure in the form of sheds and raised beds. They suggest that, for those who must garden, growing high-carbon input foods like tomatoes and asparagus is less harmful. Those foods take a lot of carbon regardless of where they’re produced. Asparagus, in particular, is often flown into the U.S. from around the world.
The article’s suggestions to “grow green” were to:
- Grow tomatoes
- Grow asparagus
- Use recycled wood and building materials
- Repair, don’t replace, aging sheds and garden beds
- Grow 90% flowers, not foods, to offset emissions with “social benefits”
I do grow tomatoes and asparagus because I like them, not because of “climate change.” My shed is over twenty years old, as I imagine a lot of sheds are. Who would put up a new shed every year?
This article does not even pretend to address the carbon offset by producing your own food rather than getting it transported into cities. I’ve been fortunate enough to live in a few agricultural valleys where I can get many of my basics (carrots, potatoes, cabbage, onions) grown within a 50-mile radius.
However, I’ve also spent time in bigger metropolitan areas, where you just can’t. The Chicago metro area, for example, extends for dozens of miles in every direction from the lake. There are some really nice farmers’ markets in the city and the suburbs, but in general, your food in Chicago is coming from a significant distance. Any way you can shorten that will be beneficial in terms of carbon offsets.
And this article doesn’t even pretend to quantify the myriad other benefits of gardening, benefits that also reduce costs to the environment.