Debates

Debate: Do food miles matter?

By Ben West ⋅ March 16, 2008 ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment ⋅ Share on Facebook

Like flying, another big source of CO₂ is from the energy used to grow, package and transport our food. As everyone knows, it takes fossil fuels like oil & gas to produce electricity and power our cars. What’s less well known is the ludicrously large amounts of these fuels also used in the modern business of making our food.

Take fertilisers, for example- in the good old days, farmers used manure (cow dung), rotten veg and so on to keep their soil full of the good stuff needed to grow big crops. Times have moved on- these days the big farmers use fertiliser made from oil- and that’s the black stuff which comes out of a hole in the ground; not the you cook with.

In the winter, they can keep growing crops- they use massive, long greenhouses called polytunnels- made from plastic made from oil. And these are heated throughout the winter using oil. When the crops are ready to pick, they’re harvested using harvesters fuelled by petrol, transported to supermarkets in lorries powered by petrol, and kept cold in refrigerators kept cold using electricity- produced, more often than not, by burning more oil.

And that’s before we take into account some of the more bizarre goings-on- Supermarket apples grown in England which are then flown out South Africa to be polished- yes, they polish apples to make them more shiny- and then flown back over here to hit supermarket shelves.

Or there’s the big supermarkets; they have massive warehouses, distribution centres, where all the food they sell gets sent by producers, before being passed on to the supermarkets. One of them only has two of these places for the entire UK. That means that although those strawberries you’re eating might have been grown just down the road from you, they’ve travelled to one of these distribution centres on the other side of the country and back again, before hitting the shelves. Clever eh?

So it’s pretty difficult to argue with- the types of farming used today use a heck of a lot of energy, and involve burning a heck of a lot of oil, which isn’t great news for those of us who don’t want to be wiped out by climate change. The solution? It’s a pretty complicated area; working out the amount of energy used to produce that banana and get it to your kitchen, but food miles might be a start.

‘Food Miles’ are basically the number of miles your banana has travelled to get to you. So if your banana has been grown in India, it’s most likely been flown in, and travelled x number of miles to get to you. That’s ultra simplified, but the bottom line is, the further it’s travelled, the more you should avoid it. Fans of cutting food miles argue that whatever else, the more local your food, the better.

On the other side of the fence, there are others that reckon ‘food miles’ is a bit simplistic. What about, for example, a ‘locally produced’ banana grown in December, here in the UK? It’d be possible to do it, but to produce the heat to re-create a tropical climate in my back yard, you’d probably end up producing much more CO₂ than if you’d just flown one in from where they grow naturally. So in the case of bananas, at least, local obviously isn’t better. It’s also obviously important to take into account the CO₂ produced in growing food, rather than just in transporting it.

Then there’s chemicals and pesticides- is it better to buy a local carrot sprayed with all manner of Earth-unfriendly chemicals, or an organic one which has been shipped in from New Zealand? And Kenyan runner beans may have travelled further than British ones, but if we don’t buy them, then surely that’s a blow to our chances of dealing with poverty in the developing world?

So food miles- useful tool, or dangerous distraction from the real issues? Here’s the facts, you decide.