Have you seen that Volkswagen ad where two neighbors are out preening their cars and taking the opportunity to compare their automobile purchases? One neighbor, a talking 1960’s era black Volkswagen Beetle named “Max”, is next to his 2009 Volkswagen Jetta TDI. The other neighbor, a nameless, pudgy, white, male, is washing his Toyota Prius. After sharing that his Jetta TDI gets 58 mpg, Max starts illustrating how powerful his car is by making dramatic “VmmmVMMMvmmm” noises as if he were a racecar speeding along a winding mountain road. Then Max pauses and innocently asks in a German accent, “What’s your hybrid sound like?” The neighbor puckers his lips into an o-shape and loudly exhales, “Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.” Max sarcastically retorts, “Dat’s kool,” even though an airy exhale is clearly anything but a cool noise for a car to make.
I thought about this a lot this summer as a rode my bike to work and inhaled lots of noxious fumes from the trucks in Berkeley, west Oakland, and Emeryville. Is it so bad that your car is quiet? I realize that diesel engines are quite fuel-efficient. But do we really need all the noise pollution that comes with a combustion engine? Although funny, this ad paves a difficult road for any real transportation innovation in the United States.
How would you feel in a city where the traffic made no noise? It would be so much more peaceful. You could sit in a park in Los Angeles and not hear the drone of a freeway zooming by. Real estate values on busy streets would creep up as the toxic fumes and the clamor of 18-wheeler trucks died down.
My wheels really started turning after I read a blog post by Matthew Holtry on Triple Pundit. The post announced the first all-electric commercial vehicle fleet, manufactured by Smith, is in the U.S. As I admired the photos of cute, brightly-painted delivery trucks, I thought, "This could be it." Unfortunately, it appears that all electric fleets, even with their advantages, have yet to woo many corporate executives. The emasculating Volkswagen ad could be contributing to the fact that Smith has yet to break into the U.S. auto market in any real capacity. Smith’s website boasts about a number of European companies who bought Smith fleets, but U.S. company logos are clearly absent from the site. (My guess is that this has something to do with the high price of gas in Europe as compared to the U.S.)
I wanted to blog about this because of the huge implications non-emitting vehicles could have on the food system. Consider all those miles and miles strawberries travel from southern California to reach Boston in December, or the fact that crisp apples must go through nine states (plus the District of Columbia) to make appearances in Florida. The current food system supplies Americans with year-round variety, quality, and quantity of food that was unimaginable prior to the development of interstate highways. But it comes at an environmental cost. Unfortunately, due to they way the highway system and trucking system were developed c system supplies Americans comes at an environmental cost. Now consider that food could be transported silently and without emitting into the air. Granted, Smith’s electric trucks are more of a prototype as the cost is still to high to convert entire fleets, but it's a start.
I uncovered a cache of information on the food system at the Davis Agricultural Sustainability Institute webpage. Quite a bit of research on greenhouse gas emissions and the food system exists on the U.C. Davis site. Unfortunately, it seems every researcher calculates greenhouse gas pollution linked to the transportation of food differently. That’s because calculating the emissions of the food system uncovers a complicated web of variables that can change depending on the focus of the study. For example, are you comparing a conventional farm to an organic farm or an average of all farms? What size farms are you examining? And what about the purchasing end? Are you purchasing from a small, local farmer’s market a few times a week or driving further to a big-box store and loading up on provisions?
However, I have confidence that creating a model to calculate the greenhouse gas emissions of the food system is possible. If researchers are able to put numbers on much more complex problems like how much CO2 the U.S. emits as a nation, then the amount the food system emits is definitely within the realm of possibility. I think we have not explored the environmental cost of our food because we’re scared. According to one whitepaper published by U.C. Davis, 29% of the U.S.’s greenhouse gas emissions are from food production and transportation. Let’s be honest, “Dat’s not kool.”
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