Food Miles

Food Miles

There is a lot if discussion about food miles, with the mantra to reduce the carbon footprint by shopping locally.  While there are many reasons to buy locally, such as freshness, support for the local economy, or knowing the origin of your food, it turns out that carbon footprint is not one of them.

 I recently completed a Coursera (www.coursera.org) course on Sustainability, taught by Jonathan Thomkins of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  In the final lecture of the course, Jonathan discussed food miles.

Using the example of a fruit salad with 2 pounds of apples traveling 2,000 miles from Washington State, 2 pounds of bananas traveling 2,500 miles from Costa Rica, and one quarter pound of local honey, 160 miles away, he calculated that there were about 2000 miles per pound to get the food to Chicago.  This compares with the 1,500 miles national average.

It turns out that 80% of the carbon footprint is due to production: tractor fuel, production of fertilizers and pesticides, etc., 11% is attributed to long haul transportation, 4% is caused by the wholesale to retail distribution system and 5% by the consumer traveling to the store to purchase the food.

This last part has caused me to think about my buying habits.  I have a friend who is urging me to buy organic and local.  He shops at the farmer’s market 15 miles away and travels about 30 miles round trip to an organic farm several times a year to share in their harvest.  While I support all of these agendas, I worry about the environmental impact of using so much gasoline traveling to all of these venues.

 
Years ago, we had a similar situation when a woman would drive across town to buy recycled toilet paper, because she wanted to support the recycle movement.  The goal was admirable, but the environmental cost in gasoline consumption was greater than the energy savings through recycling.

Another point that Jonathan made was that there are efficiencies inherent in certain food production areas.  He noted that raising lamb in New Zealand and shipping it to the U.K. generates half the CO2 emissions compared to raising the lamb in the U.K.  This is because the climate in New Zealand allows year round grazing and does not require sheltering the animals and feeding them farm produced fodder in the winter as needed in the U.K.

In another Coursera program, Food Systems, Bob Lawrence of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health covered our industrial food system.  In the final two lectures, he had guest speakers discuss alternatives, such as non-profit organic farms to support food banks and inner city farmers markets, Meatless Mondays, and the innovations of the Toronto Food Policy Council headed by Wayne Roberts.

Wayne noted that in one of their studies they found that 20% of all car trips were to get food.  He is now working to see if part of the highway maintenance budget can be diverted to the creation of neighborhood grocery stores in order to reduce the use of cars in grocery shopping.

 

Food miles is not as simple a concept as it seems.  There are many parts to consider.  Sometimes, we focus on just one element of a problem and lose sight of the big picture.  We need to start looking at the system, rather than the components.  Sometimes, because of our shortsightedness, we are our own worst enemies.