• Common Ground •

Did You Know? Food Miles

…That a typical strawberry, which holds 5 calories of nourishment, requires approximately 435 calories of fuel to be delivered from the field to your grocery store? That’s 3,300 miles from California to New York, not counting detours for processing and packaging. Looking at “food miles” is one way of assessing the sustainability of a food item. Clearly, an item that wastes more calories than it produces is not sustainable. Even the environmental benefits of “organic” foods are offset when they are over-packaged, over-processed, and shipped across the nation, leading many to emphasize the importance of eating not just organically, but locally as well. It’s easier than it sounds; to start, we can stop importing and exporting identical items. Apples are New York’s second biggest agricultural export (after milk), yet most apples you find in our grocery stores come from Chile, some 5,100 miles away. Eating locally and reducing food miles through your CSA is a way of lessening our impact on the environment while supporting our small farmers and the local economy.[Thanks Paula at Just Food ]

WE are not the only country suffering this issue as the next excerpt is from Great Britain.

Food travels further these days partly because the centralised systems of supermarkets have taken over from local and regional markets. It defies common sense, but a pint of milk or a crop of potatoes can be transported many miles to be packaged at a central depot and then sent many miles back to be sold near where they were produced in the first place.
Also, because of the way the food processing industry works, ingredients travel around the country from factory to factory, before they make their way to the shops.
Then there’s imported produce. Ninety-five per cent of the fruit and half of the vegetables in the UK are imported. The amount of food being flown into the UK doubled in the 1990s and is predicted to rise further each year. To take one example, strawberries are flown in from warmer climates to satisfy our desire for permanent dietary summertime, and air freight has a far bigger impact on the environment than sea or road travel has.
Another reason for mounting food miles is comparative labour costs. For example, some British fish is now sent to China (where labour costs are much lower) for processing, then sent back to the UK to be sold.Consumers are also directly responsible for increased food miles.Consumers are also directly responsible for increased food miles. We now travel further for our shopping and use the car more often to do it. Each year, the average UK adult travels about 135 miles by car to shop for food, more often than not making trips to large, out-of-town supermarkets. This is something the Government hopes the consumer will address. Sound familiar??

This is an excerpt from a paper written by Frederick Kirschenmann. You can view the entire artilce at if you cut and paste; http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/pubs/staff/files/health_Gleanings0806.pdf I strongly urge you to do so. This is one of the most cogent statements refering to the issue of food value that I've read in a long time!

During most of the industrial period the food industry has been fixated on
providing as much food as cheaply as possible. Any connections between
farming, nutrition, food and health were either assumed or ignored.
But human health cannot be maintained apart from eating healthy
nutritious food, which requires healthy soil, clean water and healthy
plants and animals. It’s all connected.
And in much of the industrial food system those connections have
been disrupted with consequences that we are just beginning to
glimpse, let alone understand.
THE QUEST FOR “CHEAP FOOD” IS CHANGING FOOD ITSELF
“Cheap food,” we are told, is a cornerstone of our agriculture policy. It
allows us to maintain our quality of life and is therefore a sacred princi-
ple of our food and farming system. However, in the quest for ever
cheaper food, changes in production methods have changed food itself.
For example, at a recent meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, Donald Davis, a biochemist at the University
of Texas, reported on recent studies of fruits, vegetables and wheat that
demonstrate that the nutrient value of these foods had declined by 5 to
35 percent during the last half century. Other reports have indicated a
decrease in the value of some nutrients in meat and dairy products by
as much as sixty percent. So the vitamins, minerals and proteins that
you believe are part and parcel of the foods you buy may no longer be
present at the levels they once were.
Scientists still argue about the cause of this nutrient dilution. Some
believe it is due to the fact that we have not paid attention to soil health—
relying instead on commercial fertilizers to insert a few essential nutri-
ents into depleted soil. Others argue that it is due to the fact that we have
only sought to maximize yields in our seed breeding programs, ignoring
genetics that support nutrient value. Likely both are causes.

Top