Understanding Food Miles: Why They Matter for the Environment

• What are Food Miles?
• What are The Environmental Costs of Food Transportation?
• What are the Environmental Costs of Food Production?
• How do Food Miles Affect Each Country?
• How Do Sustainable Practices and Consumer Choices Affect Food Miles?
• What are the Impacts of Food Miles?
• What are your Thoughts on Food Miles?

What are Food Miles?

Food miles measure how far food travels from where it’s grown to where it’s eaten. For example, locally sourced fruit or vegetables from a nearby farm won’t accumulate many food miles. But if you crave fresh mangoes in your smoothie during the cold months, they have likely travelled a great distance to reach you.

Professor Tim Lang at the Sustainable Agriculture Food and Environment (SAFE) created this idea to help us see how much our food choices impact the environment. Knowing about food miles can help us make better choices that are kinder to the planet.

What are The Environmental Costs of Food Transportation?

Moving food from one place to another adds to its carbon footprint, the total amount of greenhouse gases it produces. Alternative ways of transporting food have different impacts.

For example, flying food by plane creates much more pollution than shipping it by boat. Some foods travel thousands of miles before they reach our shores, like Nutella, which travels about 28,731 miles, and Snickers bars, which travel 50,791.5 miles because their ingredients come from all over the world.

What are the Environmental Costs of Food Production?

It’s important to consider how food is produced, not just how far it travels. For example, raising cattle for beef uses many resources and produces many greenhouse gases, much more than just moving the meat around. Even food grown nearby can be bad for the environment if it needs a lot of water, land, or other resources.

For instance, to make beef in China, many steps involve resources from around the world. Chemicals travel from Canada to the US to help grow fruits and vegetables. Soybeans grown in Brazil are used to feed the cattle. Coal from Australia and Indonesia and machines from Germany are also needed in the process. This shows how making food can have a significant impact on the environment.

How do Food Miles Affect Each Country?

The problem of food miles doesn’t affect every country the same way. Wealthy countries, even though they are only a tiny part of the world’s population, are responsible for much of the pollution from transporting food internationally. Studies have shown that moving food isn’t the only issue; how the food is produced and what kinds of food we eat can also significantly impact the environment.

If you only buy local products, we might stop buying what we can’t produce ourselves. However, this would cut off necessary income for people in other parts of the world. For example, about 1.5 million people in sub-Saharan Africa rely on selling food to the UK. If we stop buying their air-freighted fruits and vegetables, which make up 40% of our imports from that region, it will barely lower the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions by less than 0.1%—not worth it in the long run.

To reduce your environmental impact, consider eating less meat and dairy and avoiding foods typically flown in due to their quick spoilage. Instead of asparagus, green beans, berries, and cherries, consider reducing your consumption of other quickly perishable foods like peas, snap peas, grapes, and plums.

How Do Sustainable Practices and Consumer Choices Affect Food Miles?

To eat sustainably, we must do more than look at food miles. We should try to eat local and seasonal foods, eat less meat, and understand more about where our food comes from. Some products now have labels that show how much pollution was created by making them, which can help us make better choices.

The Carbon Trust has checked over 37,000 products globally, including various foods. Their carbon footprint label is a footprint symbol on B2C & B2B products from Quorn, Yeo Valley, Danone, and others.

Other brands have their ways of showing carbon footprints, but the UK doesn’t have a standard label yet. This makes it harder to determine which foods are best for the environment. However, you can use the food miles calculator for some guidance. Is there anything we can do now while we wait for a standard carbon footprint label?

What are the Impacts of Food Miles?

Food miles help us understand one part of our food’s environmental impact, but there’s much more to consider. By choosing local foods, eating what’s in season, and reducing our meat consumption, we can help make our food system more sustainable. This is better for our planet and allows us to care for our environment.

While food miles are essential, they’re just one part of a bigger story about making better food choices for the sake of our planet.

What are your Thoughts on Food Miles?

What do you think now that you know about the environmental impact of producing food? Do you believe the advantages of local farming make up for the many resources it uses, or do you think the environmental costs are too big, no matter where the food comes from? How do you feel about reducing the impact of our global food supply?

Please share your thoughts in the comments below. We want to hear your opinions on how you handle these issues daily. Check out some of The Benefits of Consuming Farm Produce. At Food Prepped Marketplace, your favourite shop is a click away.