Good food?
好吃么？

If you think you can make the planet better by clever shopping, think again. You might make it worse

仔细想想，购物时精明一点就可以让世界更美好吗？说不定会添乱哦。

“You don't have to wait for government to move... the really fantastic thing about Fairtrade is that you can go shopping!” So said a representative of the Fairtrade movement in a British newspaper this year. Similarly Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New York University, argues that “when you choose organics, you are voting for a planet with fewer pesticides, richer soil and cleaner water supplies.”

“你不用等政府来采取行动……‘公平贸易’真正奇妙的地方在于购物可以成为你的自觉行为！”公平贸易运动的一个代表今年在英国一家报纸上如是说。无独有偶，纽约大学营养学家马里昂•内斯托也认为，“选择了有机食品，就等于选择了一个杀虫剂更少，土壤更加肥沃，饮水更加纯净的地球。”

The idea that shopping is the new politics is certainly seductive. Never mind the ballot box: vote with your supermarket trolley instead. Elections occur relatively rarely, but you probably go shopping several times a month, providing yourself with lots of opportunities to express your opinions. （1）If you are worried about the environment, you might buy organic food; if you want to help poor farmers, you can do your bit by buying Fairtrade products; or you can express a dislike of evil multinational companies and rampant globalisation by buying only local produce. And the best bit is that shopping, unlike voting, is fun; so you can do good and enjoy yourself at the same time.

有人把购物看成是一种新的政治活动，这种观点的确很有吸引力。不用担心没有投票箱——用超市手推车“投票”就行。相比较而言，你很少遇到选举，但你每个月可能都得购好几次物，因此你也就有了很多机会“表达你的见解”。如果为环境问题感到担忧，你也许会购买有机食品；如果希望帮助贫困农民，你可能购买公平贸易食品以尽绵薄之力；又或者，如果想对声名狼藉的跨国公司和毫无节制的全球化表示一下反感，你就会购买地产食品。最妙的是购物不同于投票选举，它是一件有意思的事，可以让你既做了好事也享受了购物的乐趣。

Sadly, it's not that easy. There are good reasons to doubt the claims made about three of the most popular varieties of “ethical” food: organic food, Fairtrade food and local food. （2）People who want to make the world a better place cannot do so by shifting their shopping habits: transforming the planet requires duller disciplines, like politics.

可惜实际上没那么简单。最受欢迎的三种“良知食品”（即有机食品、公平贸易食品和地产食品）有关的主张并不足信。人们希望让世界变得更加美好，但要实现这个愿望，仅仅依靠改变购物习惯是不可能的——改变世界还是要靠比较乏味的方式，比如政治。

Buy organic, destroy the rainforest

购买有机食品＝毁坏热带雨林

Organic food, which is grown without man-made pesticides and fertilisers, is generally assumed to be more environmentally friendly than conventional intensive farming, which is heavily reliant on chemical inputs. But it all depends what you mean by “environmentally friendly”. Farming is inherently bad for the environment: since humans took it up around 11,000 years ago, the result has been deforestation on a massive scale. But following the “green revolution” of the 1960s greater use of chemical fertiliser has tripled grain yields with very little increase in the area of land under cultivation. Organic methods, which rely on crop rotation, manure and compost [1] in place of fertiliser, are far less intensive. So producing the world's current agricultural output organically would require several times as much land as is currently cultivated. There wouldn't be much room left for the rainforest.

由于有机食品生产过程中不使用人造的杀虫剂和肥料，因此人们一般都想当然地认为有机食品的“环境友好”特征比高度依赖化学制剂应用的传统集约型农业更为明显。不过，这完全要看“环境友好”指的到底是什么。从本质上看，农业对环境总归是有害的——自从约11000年前人类开始从事农业以来，已经有大面积的森林遭到砍伐。但是随着20世纪60年代“绿色革命”的到来，化学肥料的大量使用使得粮食产量提高了3倍，而耕地面积并没有增加多少。有机生产方式不讲究精耕细作，不使用化学肥料，主要依靠轮作、粪肥和混合肥。因此，目前全球农业总产量如果都来自有机生产方式，那么所需耕地面积将是现有面积的数倍之多。这样一来，热带雨林面积就会少得不能再少。

Fairtrade food is designed to raise poor farmers' incomes. It is sold at a higher price than ordinary food, with a subsidy passed back to the farmer. But prices of agricultural commodities are low because of overproduction.（3）By propping up the price, the Fairtrade system encourages farmers to produce more of these commodities rather than diversifying into other crops and so depresses prices—thus achieving, for most farmers, exactly the opposite of what the initiative is intended to do. And since only a small fraction of the mark-up on Fairtrade foods actually goes to the farmer—most goes to the retailer—the system gives rich consumers an inflated impression of their largesse[2] and makes alleviating poverty seem too easy.

公平贸易食品旨在提高贫困农民的收入。其售价比一般食品高，而部分差价则作为补贴发还给农民。但农产品生产过剩会造成其价格降低。公平贸易体系会首先稳住价格，并以此鼓励农民不要转种其它作物，而是生产更多的“公平贸易产品”，因此导致价格下跌——这样一来，对于大多数农民来说，最终获得的与他们所预期的正好相反。此外，由于公平贸易食品高出普通食品的差价只有少部分归农民所有（大部分都被零售商赚走了），这种体系就会让有钱的消费者满以为自己慷慨大方，而且让人们觉得减少贫困似乎轻而易举。

（4）Surely the case for local food, produced as close as possible to the consumer in order to minimise “food miles” and, by extension, carbon emissions, is clear? Surprisingly, it is not. A study of Britain's food system found that nearly half of food-vehicle miles (ie, miles travelled by vehicles carrying food) were driven by cars going to and from the shops. Most people live closer to a supermarket than a farmer's market, so more local food could mean more food-vehicle miles. Moving food around in big, carefully packed lorries, as supermarkets do, may in fact be the most efficient way to transport the stuff.

所谓地产食品，是指在距离消费者尽可能近的地方生产，从而最大限度地缩短了“食品里程”（从产出到成为消费者盘中餐的这段过程）并减小了二氧化碳释放范围的食品。地产食品真有这样的优点吗？叫人惊讶的是，实际上并非如此。一项针对英国食品制度的研究发现，“食品运输里程”（即运送食品的车辆行驶里程）有近一半是由送货到商店及拉货出商店（将买好的产品运送回家）的车子所行驶的。大多数人住的地方离超市较近，而距离农贸市场比较远，因此地产食品越多，可能就意味着“食品运输里程”越长。事实上，只有像超市一样用包裹得严严实实的大货车运送食品也许才是最为高效的运货方式。（货物容量大，平均用的里程就少。但家家户户都用这个大货车去买东西，岂不滑天下之大稽？）

What's more, once the energy used in production as well as transport is taken into account, local food may turn out to be even less green. Producing lamb in New Zealand and shipping it to Britain uses less energy than producing British lamb, because farming in New Zealand is less energy-intensive. And the local-food movement's aims, of course, contradict those of the Fairtrade movement, by discouraging rich-country consumers from buying poor-country produce. （5）But since the local-food movement looks suspiciously like old-fashioned protectionism masquerading[3] as concern for the environment, helping poor countries is presumably not the point.

况且，如果同时把生产中使用的能源和运输两个因素都考虑进来的话，地产食品也许更不环保。由于新西兰农业的能源使用不太密集，因此在新西兰生产羊肉然后把它运到英国这一过程所消耗的能源要比直接在英国生产羊肉少。此外，因为地产食品运动不赞成富国的消费者购买穷国的产品，因此其宗旨与公平贸易运动的宗旨必然是相互矛盾的。不过，地产食品运动看上去似乎就是打着关心环境幌子的贸易保护主义运动，大概压根儿就没想过要帮助穷国吧。

Appetite for change

渴望改变

The aims of much of the ethical-food movement—to protect the environment, to encourage development and to redress the distortions in global trade—are admirable. The problems lie in the means, not the ends. No amount of Fairtrade coffee will eliminate poverty, and all the organic asparagus in the world will not save the planet. Some of the stuff sold under an ethical label may even leave the world in a worse state and its poor farmers poorer than they otherwise would be.

“良知食品”运动的主要目的在于保护环境、促进发展和纠正全球贸易中的不正当行为。这都是值得钦佩的。出问题的并不是这些目的，而是实现目的的手段。公平贸易咖啡再多也不会消除贫困，全世界所有的有机芦笋也拯救不了地球。有些“良知食品”甚至会让世界糟之又糟，让农民苦上加苦。

So what should the ethically minded consumer do? Things that are less fun than shopping, alas. （6）Real change will require action by governments, in the form of a global carbon tax; reform of the world trade system; and the abolition of agricultural tariffs and subsidies, notably Europe's monstrous common agricultural policy, which coddles[4] rich farmers and prices[5] those in the poor world out of the European market. Proper free trade would be by far the best way to help poor farmers. Taxing carbon would price the cost of emissions into the price of goods, and retailers would then have an incentive to source locally if it saved energy. But these changes will come about only through difficult, international, political deals that the world's governments have so far failed to do.

那么有良知的消费者该做些什么呢？唉，就做一些不如购物有意思的事吧。能否发生真正的改变决定于各国政府能否行动起来，如开始征收烟尘排放税、改革世界贸易体制、取消农业关税和补贴，特别是要废除荒诞的欧洲“共同农业政策”（迁就照顾富裕农户，而对那些贫困农民却漫天要价，以致其被迫离开市场）。就目前来看，帮助穷苦农民最好的办法是适可而止的自由贸易。征收烟尘排放税会导致排放成本转移到商品价格中，进而促使零售商在确保节能的前提下从本地选择货源。然而，要实现这些变革，必须依靠国际间在政治上排除万难反复磋商，可迄今为止世界各国政府都无法做到这一点。

（7）The best thing about the spread of the ethical-food movement is that it offers grounds for hope. It sends a signal that there is an enormous appetite for change and widespread frustration that governments are not doing enough to preserve the environment, reform world trade or encourage development. Which suggests that, if politicians put these options on the political menu, people might support them. The idea of changing the world by voting with your trolley may be beguiling. But if consumers really want to make a difference, it is at the ballot box that they need to vote.

推广良知食品运动最有益的方面在于，它让人们有理由满怀希望。它清楚地表明，人们非常强烈的渴望改变，并对政府在保护环境、改革世界贸易和促进发展上的不力表现普遍感到失望。这也表明，要是政治家将上述的一些行动纳入他们的议事日程，也许就会赢得人们的支持。用手推车投票来改变世界或许是个玩笑的想法，但假如消费者真想让自己的生命更精彩，那就往真正的投票箱里投上一票吧。

[NOTES]

1. compost n. [U, C] mixture of decayed organic matter, manure, etc added to soil to improve the growth of plants 混合肥料; 堆肥.

2. largesse n. n. 慷慨的赠与, 慷慨赠与物, 慷慨的赏钱

3. masquerade v. [I, Ipr] ~ (as sth) pretend to be sth one is not; disguise oneself as sth or sb else 伪装为某事物; 乔装为某物或某人: masquerade as a policeman 假扮成警察 * The prince masqueraded as a peasant. 那王子乔装为农夫.

4. coddle v. [Tn]1 treat (sb) with great care and tenderness 悉心照料（某人）: He'll need to be coddled after his illness. 他病後需要悉心照料.2 cook (eggs) in water just below boiling-point （在刚刚低于沸点的水中）煮（鸡蛋）. (to treat someone in a way that is too kind and gentle and that protects them from pain or difficulty)

5. price v. price oneself/sth out of the `market charge such a high price for one's goods, services, etc that nobody buys them 漫天要价以致无人问津.