Food Miles – how far your food travels & the environmental impact

How Far Has Your Food Traveled?

Take a look at that luscious, juicy mango on your plate. Your mouth is no doubt watering as you anticipate digging into its sweet ripeness.

But the sweetness of that mango or clementine or strawberry starts to sour a bit when you consider the environmental cost of growing the crop and transporting it to your doorstep.

There have been hardy types who have vowed for health and environmental reasons to restrict their diets to food produced within 100 miles (roughly 166 km) of their homes. Most of them have found this was incredibly difficult and that required a great deal of sacrifice.

What has become commonly known as the 100-mile pledge might be impossible in Vancouver if you want to cook with extra virgin olive oil or you’re craving wild-caught salmon in Saskatoon or oranges when you live in Quebec. And forget about grains entirely if you live in BC. They’re just not grown there.

We’re not talking about Ho-Hos or Ding-Dongs or Tostitos here. We’re talking about real food: apples, potatoes, beef, carrots, onions and lettuce.

Consumers are increasingly asking not only how their food was grown but where it comes from.

Of course, labeling will usually tell you about produce, but not necessarily about meat and dairy products.

If your supermarket isn’t labeling foods so you know what is local, an easy first step would be asking the manager to do so, suggests Greg Horn, author of Living Green: A Practical Guide to Simple Sustainability (Freedom Press, 2006 – see below)

Regardless of the difficulty of the 100-mile pledge today, it’s still a goal worth striving for. “In the long term,” says Living Green author Horn, “We need to support local agriculture, encourage local farmers and make sure there is a thriving market for their products.”

It stands to reason that food produced near your home will maintain its nutritional value better than that orange that travelled 8,000 km in the dead of winter.

But think about the carbon footprint of that pineapple from Hawaii or that burger from Argentina.

Greenhouse gas emissions from food distribution

In 2005, the Region of Waterloo (Ontario) Public Health released some sobering statistics about the real cost of our food.

“The imports of 58 commonly eaten foods travel an average of 4,497 km to Waterloo Region,” says the report compiled by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. “These imports account for 51,709 tonnes of GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions annually, contributing to climate change and air quality, which both have an effect on human health.”

More importantly, the Waterloo report includes only foods that can be grown in that region, making the environmental impact even more devastating. The scientists estimated that switching from imports to locally produced foods could save nearly 50,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions from the truck that bring the foods from faraway producers. That savings would be the equivalent of taking 16,191 cars off the road.

The biggest culprit? Beef, far and away. The average burger or steak travels 5,770 kilometers to get to Waterloo’s tables.

You might say, “But I’m a vegetarian. Surely the cost of my pears wouldn’t be as high as that!”

You’d be right, but the cost is still enormous. Your pear has traveled more than 6,000 km to get to your table and the annual greenhouse gas emissions to get it there were the equivalent of removing 1,641 cars from the road, 561 times more than if you’d bought a locally produced fruit that would have more nutrients and probably ripened longer on the tree.

Speaking of vegetarian diets, the environmental impact of meat production in terms of water and land usage far exceeds “cost” of vegetable protein production. It takes about ten grams of grain to produce one gram of meat and requires about 26 times the amount of water.

Carbon footprint of your burger

Dutch research shows that, in general, the carbon footprint of your beef burger is about 25 times that of a soy burger, but there are some variables that may balance out the equation.

When you take into account the long distance air transport, deep freezing and horticultural practices, “Long-distance transported vegetarian foods may actually have a bigger carbon footprint than locally-produced organic beef,” says the Dutch study author, Lucas Reijnders of the University of Amsterdam.

Food miles have finally found place on the sustainable living radar screen. You can do you part, not only by buying local, but by choosing foods that have lighter impact and smaller carbon footprints.

You can find an excellent food miles calculator for foods imported to Canada and transported within the country at: http://www.lifecyclesproject.ca/initiatives/food_directory/

There are some who would say that food miles are an oversimplification and remind us to take into account agricultural practices in other countries, efficiency of transportation, etc. One New Zealand study claims that sustainable farming techniques make lamb produced in New Zealand environmentally cheaper than locally grown British lamb, even taking into consideration the 18,000 kilometer transport.

“My advice to people is to get started somehow,” says Horn. “It’s a continuum of steps between doing nothing and moving onto an organic farm and producing all your food yourself. Neither is very practical in my minds. The best advice is to arm yourself with information and do what you can to make the right choices.”

The real environmental cost of that Beef Burger

The real cost of importing beef to the Waterloo, Ont. Region:

Those imported burgers come from as far away as Argentina and New Zealand.

Transporting them to Ontario produces annual greenhouse gasses (GHG) of 15,729 tonnes. This is the equivalent of the pollutants emitted by 5,146 cars, 667 times the carbon footprint of locally produced beef.

Kathleen Barnes, the author of this article, is author or editor of 13 books, most of them on natural health and sustainable living. She is also president of Take Charge Books, she produces teleseminars, and is an avid blogger and Twitterer. Find her at www.kathleenbarnes.com