Low Impact

Reducing your food miles is all about considering how far your food has travelled before ending up in your fridge. We’re now so used to being able to buy our fruit and vegetables all year round, but we forget that it has had to be trucked or freighted in for possibly thousands of kilometres. All that transport requires a lot of oil, which in turn means a lot of greenhouse gas emissions.

Theres other non-environmental reasons why you may want to reduce your food miles. Buying more locally means that your money stays in the local economy. And with food in particular, the less it’s had to travel, the fresher it should be!

In Australia, the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code generally requires that the country of origin be labelled (with a few exceptions). So normally, its pretty easy to see if the food on your plate has already clocked up some serious international miles! It’s mind-boggling to realise how many of our day-to-day purchases have travelled long distances. Tinned tomatoes, for instance, often come from Italy – thats 16,000 kilometres! But right next to them on the shelf, you’ll find (if you look hard enough!) tomatoes grown in Australia!

Of course, just because something was made in the country, it still could have travelled a few thousand kilometres to get to your cupboard. It can be hard to determine exactly where a particular food item was sourced from, although some manufacturers will give some information on the packaging. Another solution is to utilise the local Farmers Markets – these are held in most towns and allow local famers to come and sell their produce direct to the consumer. The website http://www.farmersmarkets.org.au has information on a number of different Farmer’s Markets, and for Canberra people, the website http://www.capitalregionfarmersmarket.com.au is a good resource.

And if you want to take things to the extreme, there’s the famous “100 Mile Diet”, popularised by a Canadian couple who made an undertaking to only eat produce grown within 100 miles of their doorstep. Its difficult, but apparently it can be done – the website http://100milediet.org has a wealth of information on the concept.

Obviously, the distance food has travelled is not the only factor worth considering. For instance, is it better to buy something local that was intensively grown with herbicides and pesticides, or buy the organic product that has travelled a little further? But that aside, food miles are a concept thats definitely worth bearing in mind on your next shopping trip.

Categories: community, environment, green