Food Miles

The topic of food miles – the distance produce has travelled before reaching the supermarket shelf – has been causing a stir here in the UK.  The increasing numbers of fresh vegetables and fruit which are transported as air-freight have started to become headline news.  Even the big grocery stores are responding to pressure and starting to label produce according to how it reached us.

It’s not hard to see why – it has all the makings of a good plot.  There’s the wealthy corporate players; ‘Customers demand fresh strawberries in December and we fly them in to meet that demand.’  Then the eco-warriors: ‘Air-freight is a major contributor to global warming.’ To add an extra layer of interest there are ethical issues: ‘Out of season crops provide a valuable cash crop for developing communities in Africa.’ And finally Joe Bloggs from round the corner: ‘Why should I care where it comes from?’  Decide to scrap air-freight and you risk bankrupting poor farmers in developing countries and reduced sales.  Decide to keep it and you’re open to charges of environmental suicide and pandering to the pressure of big retailers.

Please don’t misunderstand me – I don’t want to minimize the importance of these issues.  In fact I was pleased to see that the Soil Association – the largest Organic certification body in the UK – recently held a consultation on the issue.  Of course, it’s a very difficult subject but the conclusions they reached seem fair: Air-freighted produce can now only be certified organic if the agriculture meets their strict ‘ethical production’ guidelines (or that of the Fairtrade Foundation) demonstrating benefit to poorer farmers.  Furthermore they must work to reduce dependence on air-freight.

An article in January’s UK ‘Organic Gardening’ magazine takes a different tack: In a flight of fantasy John Walker writes, pretending it’s the year 2027, about the newly introduced ‘Home Growing Act’ which gives tax-breaks for anyone growing their own produce as part of wide-sweeping measures to tackle global warming.  It’s certainly an interesting proposition.  Unfortunately I think it’s a little unrealistic, though many gardeners would love to think otherwise.

Home growing is of course a great answer to the problem of food miles.  But in our busy modern lives I think there is an additional factor to take into consideration: food-metres.  Allotments, where you get a decent space to grow-your-own, are all well and good but lots of people, myself included, find them hard to squeeze into the time-pressured days that involve work and family as well.  The problem seems best measured by how far away your growing space is from your home or place of work – what I call the ‘food-metres’.  If it’s more than 500 food-metres, I’ll bet that you’ll find it difficult to visit daily.  Over a couple of thousand food-metres and it’s definitely out-of-sight, out-of-mind and becomes more of a chore.

I might not fully agree with John Walker’s article about 2027 but one thing he mentions that I’d really like to see is houses and town-developments automatically including ‘growplots’ – really local areas for growing your own food.  That would put home-grown produce firmly back at the centre of the community.  A truly local solution to a problem of global proportions…