I appreciate the idea but this is a little misleading. They chose to label transportation for farmers markets but not CSA boxes. There is obviously transportation involved in both.

They highlight delivery as a step in the food delivery service, but don’t label it similarly when the consumer goes to the store to pick it up. I might argue there’s efficiency in having one delivery driver vs everyone acting as their own delivery driver.

I think this is quite misleading in the sense that a full truck carrying goods is very efficient per good item when compared to everyone carrying a couple meals in their private cars.

Why is packing and distribution two items on only the last one?

How to shorten your free time

In terms of carbon emissions, WHAT you eat is far more impactful than WHERE it came from

I tried to shorten my food chain. 107 degree Fahrenheit weather and $100 per month in water made it ridiculous to try to grow my own food.

Meat consumption adds extra steps of growing food and feeding the animals as well

Forgot the couple people at farmers markets that buy from supermarkets.

sure bud, just give me a garden, gardening tools, seeds and shoulder maintenance cost a vast majority cant go past supermarkets

The last two are the same. Except you are replacing 100 individual automobile trips to the grocery store at peak hours with one van driving around for 8 hours.

I see most of the comments discussing efficiency, the inability to have your own garden, or other limiting factors. And I believe all of them are missing the point. There are many and good reasons to shorten your food chain, and efficiency is not one of them. I would expect to at least see some people (there was one exception) considering the value of doing so in their lives, but nope.

So... Not very long ago, most of the people were actually living as farmers. Eric Hobsbawm, in this book, has done a great job describing what it took for the shift to happen, during the industrial revolution. For the people to actually be forced to abandon their land and start accumulating in urban environments where having your own garden is practically impossible for most of them. And it was not good. Child labor, people starving to death, extreme poverty, extreme exploitation of human labor. Many things changed, and most of them did not actually benefit the majority of the people who were forced to abandon or sell their land in order for people who could actually afford more efficient farming approaches (through machines) to replace them while accumulating wealth in an unprecedented manner. Maybe it's worth examining this shift. Both the argument of efficiency and limiting factors, are not exactly new and are not exactly serving most of us either.

Besides the historical aspect, the how did we get here, of the long food chains. There are other aspects that make them harmful. The ones that allow for a term like "banana republic" to exist, when most of the people who use it don't pause and think what it actually means for so many people that actually get exploited so they can have their bananas, cheap and available all year (as if potassium is not abundant in every single plant food). The ones that allow for people to have access to food without actually moving at all during the day (CVD, obesity, cases where being inefficient, like... spending energy to live your life, actually improves your health, like walking, carrying some weight, cycling). The ones that allow for food to be consumed weeks, months or even years after it is produced, dramatically reducing it's quality while actually raising the cost (storage facilities, freezers, transportations through various environments).

But still, most comments at the moment and upvotes are not about those things. Except one. Interesting..

Unfortunately we were growing our own food but now have to move to a rental. Barely afford to live let alone buy stuff to grow at a rental.

Real shame. I prefer my food not packaged in plastic covered in poison.

Life aye.

I'm thinking of a garden

Misleading. How about adding the inputs before Garden/Farms? It makes more sense if we compare the efficiency of both generating and transporting one unit of food.