Susanne E. Freidberg

As concerns about global warming fuel calls to “eat local,” food miles have become a popular metric of dietary virtue. At the same time, scientific critiques of food miles have fueled controversy over exactly how to calculate and regulate food’s overall carbon footprint. This project explores how debates over the future map of food supply are also struggles over the knowledge used to draw it. Combining multisite ethnography, qualitative media analysis, and historical research, it examines how certain geographic measures of food sustainability have come to seem natural and commonsensical.