Page 16 - SpringBoard_CloseReading_Workshop_Grade6_Flipbook

6 Pick your cost, they’re all serious:
• The loss of local farm families rips at the social fabric of communities, emptying
church and school ranks, removing customers from local cafes, farm-supply and
hardware stores.
• Much of America’s most fertile farmland is around major cities, imperiled by
suburbanization. Lost farms feed just one machine: sprawl.
• Next, there’s the gluttonous energy demand of a nationalized food system.
Industrialized agriculture requires huge amounts of fossil fuel for fertilizers, to power heavy farming machinery, for elaborate plastic wrappings to refrigerate foods during shipping, and for the big trucks burning diesel fuel on their transcontinental trips.
7 Richard Pirog of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State
University calculates that produce travels an average of 1,500 miles in three days to reach his state — and even more to the East Coast.
8 By contrast, Pirog found food traveled an average of just 45 miles in a local food system of farmers selling to nearby restaurants, conference centers and institutions.
9 Then he compared the fuel and greenhouse-gas emissions. Our continent-wide distribution system uses four to 17 times the fossil fuel, and emits five to 17 times the total carbon dioxide — greenhouse gas — emissions of a local system.
10 Can consumers help? Pirog believes so. He suggests point-of-sale labels — he calls them “ecolabels” — that indicate the energy impact of any given food. Local foods would show low impact; products such as Hawaiian pineapples, borne to market by gas- guzzling planes and trucks, a “very high” rating.
11 Our national agriculture policies tip blatantly to agribusiness’ side. Still, U.S. regions can make a strong start at popularizing local food production. And many are: Check the growing number of farmers markets — doubled to more than 3,700 in the past decade. Americans are increasingly voting with their grocery dollars, selecting the fresher, and often much more flavorful and nutritious produce grown locally. Smart restaurants are starting to feature fresh, local produce.
12 But supermarkets are mostly uninterested. The significant growth ticket for local agriculture may be institutions — schools, hospitals, universities and the prisons where we hold 2 million inmates.
13 Food policy can be a powerful connective issue, too. Many of us are already trying to burn less fossil fuel, to conserve energy to help avert global warming and its potentially calamitous consequences. Becoming “locavores” (people whose instinctive first choice is local foods) is a logical complement.
suburbanization: the growth of areas on the fringes of cities
sprawl: disordered growth of cities
gluttonous: greedy
sustainable: capable of being maintained without damaging or exhausting natural resources
greenhouse gas: gases that absorb solar radiation and affect global warming, including carbon dioxide, methane, ozone, and the fluorocarbons
blatantly: obvious in an offensive way
calamitous: disastrous
complement: an addition that completes or makes perfect
Close Reading Workshop 2 • Close Reading of Argumentative Nonfiction Texts 15
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