Measure Your Food In Miles

Information for this post was borrowed from the book: "Global Warming Survival Handbook" by David De Rothschild. All copyrights, intellectual property and reproductions are the property of David De Rothchild. 

 Reasons to Reduce Food Miles:

1. Gives local farmers and rural economies a fighting chance
2. Mass farming depends on fossil fuels, deletes soils, and poisons waterways 
3. In mass-produced foods, nothing matters but yield, uniformity, and ability to withstand industrial harvesting
4. Long-hauled food loses vitamins and gains contaminants
5. Sprawling production systems leave food vulnerable to agro-terrorism
6. Easier to avoid salmonella, e. coli, and other hazards
7. Tasty, tasty food!  

 source: Living Earth and The Food Magazine, 2008

FOOD IN MILES CALCULATOR

http://www.organiclinker.com/food-miles.cfm

What are Food Miles?

Food miles are a way of attempting to measure how far food has traveled before it reaches the consumer. It is a good way of looking at the environmental impact of foods and their ingredients. It includes getting foods to you, but also getting waste foods away from you, and to the landfill!

What Does That Mean?

It means that it is time to think about where your food has come from and what environmental effects this has had.

 

Food miles are big in the food aisles.

In early September, home-grown seasonal fruit and vegetables like apples, onions, carrots and green beans were available throughout the country. But so too, in three central London supermarkets, were apples 4,700 miles from the USA, onions over 12,000 miles from Australia and New Zealand, carrots from South Africa (51,000 miles) and beans from Kenya (3,600miles). 

Calculating Environmental Costs

Now researchers in Britain and Germany have started to investigate the composite distances travelled by food, taking into account their ingredients and the materials for their packaging. To produce a small glass jar of strawberry yogurt for sale in Stuttgart, strawberries were being transported from Poland to west Germany and then processed into jam to be sent to southern Germany. Yogurt cultures came from north Germany, corn and wheat flour from the Netherlands, sugar beet from east Germany, and the labels and aluminium covers for the jars were being made over 300 km away. Only the glass jar and the milk were produced locally. In counting the yogurt's environmental costs, the lorry emerged as the main culprit. contributing to noise, danger and pollution. The study found that to bring one lorry-load of yogurt pots to the south German distribution centre a 'theoretical' lorry must be moved a total of 1005 km, using some 400 litres of diesel fuel.
But there are a whole range of further hidden miles that these calculations ignore. To grow the strawberries for the jam for the yogurt, the farmer uses fossil fuels to plant, spray and harvest the fruit, and the sprays he uses have themselves been manufactured and distributed at some environmentat cost. The aluminium for the yogurt jar lids has come from mines many thousands of miles from the packaging plant. Then there is the machinery used for packaging the yogurt, which had to be brought in from Switzerland, perhaps, or Britain, to say nothing of the transport of the workers in the yogurt processing plant going to and from their homes every day. And the transport of shoppers from their homes to the shops, in order to buy the yogurt.. So the circle widens, at every point adding to the real costs of the yogurt, but which do not get added to the price and instead must be paid for in other ways at other times. 

Ghost Acres

These include some 44 million ghost acres in Thailand alone (ie an area about the size of Ireland) devoted to supplying manioc for European cattle. Export commodities such as these distort a developing country's agricultural economy, encouraging small farmers to participate in growing cash crops for export rather than food crops for local needs. Brazil has become a major supplier of soya beans for European animal feed, but to do this it has to cut down a quarter of its Cerrada plateau forest, some 12 million acres, causing immeasurable damage. These are typical of the ghost acres, the distant, blighted areas of the world being exploited to satisfy European demands for meat and meat products. In the UK we exploit two of these ghost acres abroad for every one acre we farm at home. We can do this only because the true costs of exploiting Brazil and Thailand, and the true costs of shipping the animal feed to Europe, are not reflected in the price of the food consumers buy. 

What's the pedometer of your groceries? Calculate it yourself in this easy to use 

FOOD IN MILES CALCULATOR. click on the link below. 

http://www.organiclinker.com/food-miles.cfm