From Our Contributors: Spring 2007

Read a passage from OnEarth contributor Bill McKibben's new book

"The international food trade just keeps increasing. In the last four decades, the tonnage of food shipped between countries has grown fourfold, while human population has barely doubled. Seventy-five percent of the apples for sale in New York City come from the West Coast or overseas, even though New York State produces ten times as many apples as the residents of the Big Apple consume. In England, farmers ship roughly the same amount of milk, pork, and lamb abroad as British supermarkets import, in what agricultural economists call a food swap. As Herman Daly once wrote, 'Americans import Danish sugar cookies, and Danes import American sugar cookies. Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient.' In much of the world, 40 percent of the truck traffic comes from the shuttling of food over long distances."