This is why I love the Economist magazine. They take cutting edge issues and put a monkey wrench in conventional thinking.
Turns out, organic food is not always better for the environment, fair trade may actually exacerbate poverty in some circumstances, and buying local may be be less efficient than buying food shipped thousands of miles away sometimes.
This is a great example of why simple slogans and simple fixes lead to bad ideas and bad policy. Solving our environmental problems isn’t necessarily rocket science, but it requires putting aside many of our assumptions, categories, and biases, and trying to get to the root of the issues.
