ABSTRACT
Any book titled The Real Cost of Cheap Food has to spend a great deal of time discussing the costs of conventional foodscapes upon the environment. The ideology of cheap food has helped to give shape to an industry that is undermining its very existence. Cheap food has rightly been criticized for being energy intensive. Many assume that the global food system's massive carbon footprint is due mainly to the sheer distance that our food travels. As Benjamin Goldstein and colleagues explain in a recent article in Food Policy, the following ethical perspectives are built into all life cycle analyses (LCAs). It is important to recognize that analyses like LCAs and food miles have governing qualities. An LCA compares the environmental impacts of ready-made roast dinners manufactured industrially with one prepared at home from scratch. It examines the environmental performance of five different vegetable oils—palm oil, soybean oil, rapeseed oil, sunflower oil, and peanut oil.
