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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  22
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.
From the text we learn that food miles labels______.
选项 A、are awarded to environment-friendly products
B、describe the damage to food caused by transportation
C、show the amount of fuel consumption during transport
D、is designed to advocate people to eat locally
答案C
解析 本题考查事实细节。根据题干中的food miles labels定位到第一段。该段前两句提到，环保组织强烈要求给食物贴上标明运输距离的食物里程标签。第二段紧接着提到，吃本地食物的一种广为宣传的理由是：可以减少化石燃料的消耗。减少食物里程与减少温室气体排放之间有着联系。联系第一、二段的内容可知，食物里程标签通过标明运输距离，从而间接反映运输过程中的燃料消耗量，因此[C]正确。被贴上标签的食品并不仅限于“环保产品”，排除[A]。[B]中“食物的损害”的内容在文中根本没有涉及，其实该选项是利用第一段末damage一词设计的干扰项。文中提到，一些书籍对长途运输(给环境)带来的损害进行了思考。文中对食物里程标签的介绍是它能客观反映运输距离或燃料消耗量，至于它的设计目的是什么文中未提，[D]过度引申。
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