Why long-haul food may be greener than local food with low air-miles - Times Online

Lamb and apples from New Zealand? Green beans from Kenya? That can't be a good green choice - or can it???

Check out Why long-haul food may be greener than local food with low air-miles - Times Online. As many of us gather to read the book Deep Economy, we want to keep in mind the total carbon footprint, based on something called "life cycle assessment". The life cycle assessment approach takes into consideration all aspects of energy use required to cultivate, grow, packagem store and transport our food (or anything for that matter). While logically it makes much more sense to "buy locally", there are instances in these articles which clearly illustrate some exceptions to this rule!

For other examples of life cycle assessment vs. food miles, check New Yorker Article - How the myth of food miles may hurt the planet.

There are some rules of thumb. Eat less (waste less - in the UK, about 1/3 of the food bought is thrown out), use your leftovers, and compost scraps! It also seems likely that buying very local foods in season is the way to go, particularly if they were grown without lots of fertilizers and pesticides. Note, Kenyan green beans have such a low carbon footprint because they don't use tractors, the use "cow muck" for fertilizer, and they have low tech irrigation systems. And according to this article, driving 6.5 miles to buy your green beans emits more carbon than flying a pack of Kenyan green beans to the UK (in bulk obviously). Note - these articles are both written in the UK - where all of this carbon management stuff is taken very seriously.

Of course, if you're going to go to the supermarket anyway in your hybrid (and where else are you going to pick up Kenyan green beans)..... well you get the idea! This is not as simple as it seems.

There is a movement in the UK to use life cycle assessment to calculate a product's carbon footprint. However, beware, it took a whole year to figure out how to do this for a bag of potato chips (a.k.a "crisps" in th UK)! This is not for the faint of heart, there are no standards on what must be counted as part of the "footprint", and there are really too many variables. For example, are all of the potatoes for these chips sourced from the same place? How were they produced? How were they shipped? And where did that packaging come from? And the list goes on....

So read these articles to get a little smarter, and then, as always, we all need to use our own informed judgment! But now, we're just a little more informed... and perhaps a little more conscious...

This ought to make for some pretty interesting discussions in our GTG Book Study - don't you think? Pick up a copy of Deep Economy, and join us at the library on May 8th at 7pm!

Sustainably yours....