craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

babe, tonight we're gonna do the sneaky dutch. get out the pipe cleaners.

hoos what artisanal handmade local social networks u like

it takes two lips

xp

it's gonna be gouda

it only took them a hundred years to be giants! what are they hiding???? radioactive hashish?

"Statistically, the tallest people in the world, as measured by country are the Dutch. The average height for all adults for the Netherlands is 6 feet 1 inch (1.85 m). This great leap in height is a huge change for Holland, where about 100 years ago, 25% of men who attempted to join the army were rejected as being too short, less than 62 inches (1.57 m) tall."

Central currency isn't just good for "big corporations," it's good for anyone who might want to do things like, say, relocate or even travel to another place, buy things that aren't made in one's hometown, etc. It's really not possible to produce most of what modern americans have decided they need to live "locally," which is all the more reason that "locally made" becomes such a novelty/luxury marketing concept.

BTW, reminds me of milk I bought recently -- had this nicely designed label and a tag on a string (tags on strings are wholesome) that said "Local Milk" in a very pleasant and endearing font. I bought it a couple times without thinking (price was reasonable enough anyway), and then one day read the print -- it said that the milk was guaranteed to have been produced within 200 miles of the point of sale. Then it occurred to me -- most milk we buy is probably already produced within 200 miles. New York is a dairy state and it doesn't really make sense to truck milk halfway across the country, and 200 miles isn't even that local anyway -- that could be like northern mass or something.

It's really not possible to produce most of what modern americans have decided they need to live "locally,"

disagree w/this and will defend l8r tonight

handmade computer

silicon lovingly smelted from the sand of american beaches

i think u mean hand~crafted~

tbh I don't even understand how that could be a point up for argument but I eagerly await your defense hoos

i was kidding abt silicon if that wasn't clear

lol

I being this up a lot but it's not even nec environmentally friendly to consume the same shit just ~local~

it is environmentally friendly to just consume less shit tho

bring

is that just based on that food article about locally sourced meat?

well food is where it comes up for discussion most often (esp annoying w/ the 'urban agriculture' fad) but it's gonna be generally true w/ lots of things. 100,000 local axe-makers aren't necessarily better for the world than one big axe factory in china. not buying axes is!

tbf axes are surely one of the things people only buy when actually needed

Not necessarily
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/garden/01peter.html?_r=2&src=twr&pagewanted=all

(esp annoying w/ the 'urban agriculture' fad)

not so sure about urban agriculture - I think the thing with locally sourced meat is that protein sources like animals are going to consume a lot of resources and emit a lot of greenhouse gases, such that big factory meat farms are gonna have a lower overall footprint than a local pig farm simply because of autonomies of scale, and that the savings in fuel and transport didn't necessarily outweigh the initial carbon emissions.

but locally grown vegetables ought to have a lower carbon footprint than produce shipped from south america, because the growing of vegetables doesn't really produce that big of a carbon footprint!

where's an axe murderer when you need one amirite

xp

such that big factory meat farms are gonna have a lower overall footprint than a local pig farm simply because of autonomies of scale

um this is not how this works

I guarantee you a chicken factory processing 1,000 chickens puts out more GHG than a thousand people with a chicken in their backyard.

patrick bateman totally owns one of those axes

lol

I guarantee you a chicken factory processing 1,000 chickens puts out more GHG than a thousand people with a chicken in their backyard.

1000 people having backyards puts out more GHG than that chicken factory

okay, sorry shakey, I was misremembering the article. but here's the article that says that it's not whether you're buying locally sourced meat that's doing any good for the environment, it's not eating meat in the first place.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es702969f

Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%. Different food groups exhibit a large range in GHG-intensity; on average, red meat is around 150% more GHG-intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food.

the point is more that it doesn't matter if you're buying backyard chicken or outside chicken, the transportation costs is still gonna be a small % of the total GHG emissions of raising that chicken

*high fives self for working 'outside chicken' into a serious discussion*

it's not whether you're buying locally sourced meat that's doing any good for the environment, it's not eating meat in the first place.

there's no disputing that. there are a shit ton of variables involved in determining when locally sourced meat consumption is going to result in less GHG emissions than factory farmed meat, I would stay away from drawing any definitive conclusions.

here's the money quote, shakey

It is clear that even with the unrealistic assumption of zero food-miles, only relatively small shifts in the average household diet could achieve GHG reductions similar to that of localization. For instance, only 21−24% reduction in red meat consumption, shifted to chicken, fish, or an average vegetarian diet lacking dairy, would achieve the same reduction as total localization. Large reductions are more difficult in shifting away from only dairy products (at least on a calorie basis) but making some shifts in both red meat and dairy, on the order of 13−15% of expenditure or 11−19% of calories, would achieve the same GHG reduction as total localization.

like you're right that transportation is small portion of it, but meat factories emit a SHIT TON of GHGs just by virtue of their operations and their size and scale. Saying that factory farmed meat results in less GHG than locally sourced meat is specious reasoning.

I mean yeah, there are a shit ton of variables, and that's why those guys spent a lot of time studying those variables so that they could draw those conclusions...?

shakey it's gonna take 10 pounds of grain to get 1 pound of red meat no matter if you're feeding cows in a factory farm or a cow in a pasture

er left out an ALWAYS there

like a lot of it depends on how the locally sourced meat is actually raised/processed. Someone raising a chicken in their backyard, they're GHG emissions aren't gonna be increased very much - it doesn't take much (if any electricity) to keep a chicken coop, and the other major factor is feed (and where does that come from, etc.)

xp

and then yeah cows are not chickens etc

I don't really eat beef, why do I care...

1000 people having backyards puts out more GHG than that chicken factory

this... just... waht this doesn't make any sense.

that report only talks about transportation, as far as I can tell...?

i don't know, shakey - a chicken is still an animal that's gonna need to eat probably at least 5 times its weight over the course of its lifetime

backyards = houses and cars and roads

if everyone in a city has a backyard to grow vegetables in, you have an environment that's less ghg-efficient in other manners!

since when are we talking about cities only?

you can live in my city without a car? (I did for years...?)

you guys are throwing around all sorts of variables like they're certainties or givens when they are um... not

you can put gardens/coops on roofs too (cool roofs! saves energy!)

why do I bother

otm

it just seems weird to see smart people arguing for industrial-scale factory farming. like wtf guys. it's a disaster.

everybody's got a roof, amirite

lol shakey, from my perspective it's not the factory farming that's the disaster, it's the fact that we've systematically built our food culture around animal protein

but locally grown vegetables ought to have a lower carbon footprint than produce shipped from south america, because the growing of vegetables doesn't really produce that big of a carbon footprint!

I think you have to look at this from the bigger perspective - like, the individual carrot I buy that was grown in brooklyn* might have a lower carbon footprint than the argentina carrot but could every city grow every vegetable that it wants to eat within X miles? no, there's gonna be economies of scale and better places to grow certain foods. w/ more transportation-externality type taxes certain things might actually become more economic to grow closer, but individual people 'buying local' is never gonna be enough of a thing to cause meaningful change. at the end of the day consuming less is still a million times more the answer.

*I do not eat brooklyn carrots fwiw

yeah, that's true - another tragedy of modern food culture is the expectation that every vegetable/fruit is gonna be in season 365 days a year