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  3. Homegrown Isn’t Always Best The term "food miles" how far foot has traveled before you buy it—has entered the enlightened le

Homegrown Isn’t Always Best The term "food miles" how far foot has traveled before you buy it—has entered the enlightened le

admin2013-07-11  49
问题                         Homegrown Isn’t Always Best
    The term "food miles" how far foot has traveled before you buy it—has entered the enlightened lexicon. Environmental groups, especially in Europe, are pushing for labels that show how far food has traveled to get to the market, and books like Barbara King-solver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life contemplate the damage wrought by trucking, shipping and flying food from distant parts of the globe.
    There are many good reasons for eating local—freshness, purity, taste, community cohesion and preserving open space—but none of these benefits compares with the much-touted claim that eating local reduces fossil fuel consumption. On its face, the connection between lowering food miles and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions is a no-brainer. Seventy-five percent of the apples sold in New York City come from the West Coast or overseas, the writer Bill McKibben says, even though the state produces far more apples than city residents consume. In light of this market redundancy, the only reasonable reaction, it seems, is to count food miles the way a dieter counts calories.
    But is reducing food miles necessarily good for the environment?
    Researchers at Lincoln University in New Zealand recently published a study challenging the premise that more food miles automatically mean greater fossil fuel consumption. According to this peer reviewed research, compelling evidence suggests that there is more or less to food miles than meets the eye. It all depends on how you wield the carbon calculator. Instead of measuring a product’s carbon footprint through food miles alone, the Lincoln University scientists expanded their equations to include other en ergy-consuming aspects of production like water use, harvesting techniques, fertilizer outlays, disposal of packaging, storage procedures and dozens of other cultivation inputs.
    Incorporating these measurements into their assessments, scientists reached surprising conclusions. Most notably, they found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clove-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6, 280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. These life-cycle measurements are causing environmentalists worldwide to rethink the logic of food miles. New Zealand’s most prominent environmental research organization, Landcare Research-Manaaki Whenua, explains that localism " is not always the most environmentally sound solution if more emissions are generated at other stages of the product life cycle than during transport."
    " Eat local" advocates—a passionate group of which I am one—are bound to interpret these findings as a threat. We shouldn’t. Not only do life cycle analyses offer genuine opportunities for environmentally efficient food production, but they also address several problems inherent in the eat-local philosophy.
What might be the best title of the text?
选项 A、Homegrown Isn’t Always Best.
B、Food Miles Debate Heats Up.
C、Why Should Localism Be Abandoned?
D、Possible Solutions-Life Cycle Analysis.
答案A
解析 本题考查文章主旨。第一段介绍“食物里程”的概念和长途运输食物的危害，引出了第二段对吃本地食物能减少环境污染的观点的阐述。第三段是过渡段。第四、五段通过详细地介绍一项研究的原理、结论，提出了新的观点：吃本地食物不一定最有利环境。可见，全文主要围绕“吃本地食物是否有利环境”展开论述，[A]是对该主题的最佳概括，其中homegrown指的就是“本地食物”。“食物里程”只是文章一开始的一个引子，它反映了吃本地食物有利于环境的观念，排除[B]。文章仅停留在本土主义(即，吃本地食物)并非最有利环境的结论上，没有提出要摈弃，排除[C]。“生命周期分析法”是文中后面部分提到的细节，而且它只是反映食物生产对环境的影响，并不能解决任何问题，排除[D]。
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