Food Miles are not a new concept. You can read some of my thoughts here. But increasingly Food Miles are gaining a lot more attention. But with this attention, the idea is getting more and more criticism. Criticism which is often times heavily slanted towards the views of Corporate Argi-Business.

The distance food travels to our plates is only part of the issue. The amount of energy expended to get food from point A to point B is only a portion of the equation. To argue it is cheaper to fly green beans from Kenya overnight than for a local farmer to grow them and for you to drive to the farm misses out on many vital points.

Firstly we have to tackle the freshness issue. Freshness is flavor. But also freshness is ripeness and variety. The types of produce grown for transportation have become limited to those which can be picked unripe and will hold up well during storage, transportation and all subsequent handling. For the most part this precludes all the varieties which have different characteristics and qualities–ripeness, flavor, texture. Transportation homogenizes our dining experience to only those products which can be shipped at distance.

Secondly there is processing and packaging, storage and shipping. Those beans from Kenya¹ didn’t arrive at your doorstep directly from the farm in a paper sack, still covered in dew. They were taken from huge fields by truck to a processing facility and either boxed for later processing or put in crude-oil derived plastic bags in 10 ounce parcels, then boxed and held in a cold storage facility before boarding a cargo plane. Once off the cargo plane the well traveled produce makes its way to a central storage facility–being held in artificially cold conditions along the way–then trucked to various stores to be placed in their cold rooms and shelves to be sold to consumers who drive there to buy “fresh” produce.

Now critics of Food Miles will say this is justified because the consumer will buy the beans anyway, and shopping for locally produced beans on a local level actually uses more fuel. How so? The Corporate farm in Africa² uses tractors and chemical fertilizers and pesticides on a large scale to produce commercial, industrial scale produce. That is a consumption of vast quantities of fuel before the produce even reaches the market.

The local farmer, often growing a variety of produce–and perhaps different sorts of livestock as well–on one farm can produce more food, more efficiently³ than his industrial scale counterpart. If this local farmer happens to be organic than the consumption of resources is even less–no chemically derived fertilizers and pesticides and the fuel waste their production, transportation and application their production and use entails.

So this local farmer grows green beans–and probably a lot more–at most he will ship those beans 100 miles away.They will be picked fresh and shipped fresh, and probably sold fresh the same day. No storage, no refrigeration, very few miles traveled. Or this farmer will sell the produce from his farm, only picking and processing what is needed–no miles traveled.

Enter the frivolous, driving consumer–or so the critics would have you think. These locally sourcing consumers will be driving willy nilly all over creation–local creation, that is–to buy their groceries from independent sources, thereby wasting far more fuel than getting the beans from Kenya. . . . But here’s the thing. The consumer needs to buy food. Whether they drive from home to the MegaMart or to the Farmer’s Market or Farm Gate doesn’t matter. They were going to drive somewhere–and more often than not, many somewheres–to get their groceries. That shouldn’t be at issue in the food mile debate⁴.

Remember those Kenyan green bean, packaged and boxed in Africa before shipping? What happens to that waste now? The consumer buys a few packages of beans to serve and now must throw out that packaging–packaging which chances are isn’t recyclable. Bought locally those beans, and all the other produce bought is either carried home in the shoppers own containers or in paper bags from the Farmer’s Market. The packaging waste is minimal. The cost in terms of warfare to support a national addiction to oil, to the growing crisis of climate change, pollution and smog related allergies, and of depleting resources for future generations is greatly reduced.

Beyond this, by reducing the distances our food travels, we support the local economy. The economy of individuals who have our interest bound up in their own. We do not support some faceless panel of shareholders whose corporation is driven by mandate to make a profit at whatever cost.

By supporting local farmers we help maintain biodiversity, create and maintain habitats for wildlife and keep rampant, inexcusable developmental sprawl from paving over the planet. By supporting local farmers and the local economy we keep our food sources safe from bio-terrorism and foreign control. I will be exploring those topics in my next piece on why the time is right to support local foods.

Technorati Tags: food miles, sustainability, global warming, climate change, local eating, food, cooking, politics, biosecurity

1. Or Asparagus from Peru, Avocados from Mexico, Grapes from Chile [↩]
2. They would have to be large and corporate and mechanized to support flying beans around the world, wouldn’t they? [↩]
3. With less fuel usage, presumably [↩]
4. We can take up that torch in a discussion about more fuel efficient vehicles and solar power. . . [↩]