Locavores advocate paying attention to the distance your food traveled before it reached your table. They want you to be aware of the social cost of the the tomatoes you buy. Steven Landsburg ridicules this kind of micro-mindedness as follows:
You should. You should care about all those costs. And here are some other things you should care about: How many grapes were sacrificed by growing that California tomato in a place where there might have been a vineyard? How many morning commutes are increased, and by how much, because that New York greenhouse displaces a conveniently located housing development? What useful tasks could those California workers perform if they weren’t busy growing tomatoes? What about the New York workers? What alternative uses were there for the fertilizers and the farming equipment — or better yet, the resources that went into producing those fertilizers and farming equipment — in each location?
And he helpfully points out that accounting for all of this is unnecessary because these costs are already all summarized by the price of the tomato.
But even if markets are perfectly competitive, the marginal social cost of a tomato equals the price plus the under-priced cost of the environmental damage from the fuels used in transportation. Any given locavore has his own private belief about the size of that gap. So a locavore wants to know how much energy was used in order to calculate the total gap. And locavore advocates are doing precisely the right thing by presenting that information.
On the other hand, this guy, the guy who Landsburg was actually ridiculing, is spot on when he points out they often present distorted information.
Cheap Talk 
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August 24, 2010 at 11:47 am
Kevin Dick
You forgot an important factor in your analysis. If locavores are truly worried about the under-priced environmental cost of fossil fuels, food-miles is obviously not the correct metric. Total fossil fuel energy input is. So they are not doing the right thing by presenting food-miles.
August 24, 2010 at 6:32 pm
James Moore
It’s not just the environmental cost, it’s the security cost as well. Some (probably large – I’ll pull 30% out of thin air) percentage of the military budget goes to subsidize access to oil, and that should be reflected in fuel prices.
If we use about 7 billion barrels of oil per year, and the military budget is about $700 billion, I’d suggest there’s something like a $30/barrel (maybe a buck a gallon) security subsidy for oil. The back-of-the-envelope calculation says the numbers are big enough that they’re worth doing some real calculations.
August 25, 2010 at 12:03 pm
Consommer des fruits hors-saison, est-absurde ? « Rationalité Limitée
[…] le montant de ce coût « oublié » ? Difficile à dire en fait, ce qui, comme le souligne Jeff Ely, donne une certaine légitimité aux locovores dans leur tentative d’évaluation de ce coût […]
August 28, 2010 at 4:27 pm
Daniel Reeves
Landsburg responds to your point (or a similar one made by a commenter) as follows:
> [Locavores] want to correct for this particular imperfection [unpriced
> environmental damage due to transportation] in the information value of the
> price. Why this one, and not others? Why does no locavore every say: ‘Well,
> taxes are relatively high in California, so the price of California tomatos
> overstates the social cost of producing them, so we should lean more toward
> buying California tomatos.’? Once you start correcting for imperfections in
> prices, there are a lot of corrections to make, and there’s no particular reason
> to think that on balance they’d point you toward the local tomato.
>
> Fortunately, the imperfections are usually small and we can’t go too far
> wrong by relying on prices. But IF we’re going to take on the (probably
> impossible) task of correcting for those imperfections, why focus on a
> completely arbitrary subset, as the locavores do?”
Interested to hear your reply.
August 29, 2010 at 11:44 pm
jeff
The locavores who complain about high taxes in California are more commonly known as tea partiers. That is, for every imperfection there is indeed somebody working hard to inform and correct. The people we know as locavores are the ones who specialize in this particular imperfection.
I would ask Mr. Landsburg “Of all the follies people are prone to, why are you always so focused on follies of economic behavior, such as locavorism?” I expect that the answer is that he is an economist and thus a combination of comparative advantage and pure taste implies that his efforts are best spent there.
Similarly we can understand why locavores and every other kind-of-vore does the specific thing they do at the specific time they do.