Field To Fork: The Story Of Food Miles
By Joshua Rosenthal, M.S.
Filed Under Green Living, The Big Picture |
Personal food choices have an impact on our bodies and on our environment. Every single meal we eat is made up of food that requires significant amounts of energy to reach our plate. The journey our food takes is much longer than most realize. We refer to this journey as food miles - the distance food travels from field to plate. The higher the mileage, the less cool the food.
Food travels further these days because large corporate grocery stores have centralized methods for distributing food. In some cases, a crop of cherries may travel across the country to be packaged and then sent back close to where the cherries were originally grown. In other situations, stores fly in food from all over the world to ensure they have fresh produce, whatever the season. This practice causes us to have organic bananas from Peru, kiwis from New Zealand, and avocados from Mexico at any time of year.
In my own area, my food coop sells organic apples from Washington State right next to apples grown locally and they both cost about the same. Locally produced, seasonal foods cut energy use and therefore leave a smaller impact. They are much much better for the environment and for local economies.
Then there’s the matter of meat. To eat or not to eat, that is the question. Cattle require huge amounts of water. Giving up just two pounds of beef a year will save more water than if you stopped showering for a year. When is Al Gore going to start talking about this?
Corn-fed cattle also impact the environment, because each bushel of corn they eat has been treated with about 1.2 gallons of oil-based fertilizers.
Each cow consumes about 25 pounds of corn each day, which translates into a lot of fossil fuel energy. Cattle also need land for grazing; about 70% of the lands in western national forests are used for grazing. And although the US is the world’s largest producer of beef, worldwide demand for beef has caused massive deforestation in other parts of the world. Sadly, we’ve lost about 300,000 square miles of Amazon rainforest in recent times. That’s a lot of land!
But you don’t have to go vegan to eat in an environmentally friendly manner, although seriously reducing your animal food will make as much impact as switching from an SUV to a Prius.
Want to reduce your food miles? Take action!
- Please shop in natural food stores
- Ask your grocer about the source your meat is coming from
- Get to know local farmers, and look for grass-fed, certified organic and local whenever possible
- Use LocalHarvest.org and Greenpeople.org to find farmer’s markets, CSA’s, and farm-made products near you
Together we can rock this world and create a healthier environment for one and all!
Joshua Rosenthal, M.S., is the Founder, Director, and primary instructor of the largest nutrition school in the world, Institute for Integrative Nutrition. He is the author of Integrative Nutrition, The Energy Balance Diet, The Integrative Nutrition Journal, and Case Histories: The Dynamic Future of Nutrition.
Posted on June 3, 2008 |
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Thanks Joshua for the insight on food miles. Your focus seems like it’s constantly ahead of the times, so thanks for the glimpse at what will be on many people’s minds very soon.
I just caught this this great video on food miles…
[...] reading last month’s article on food miles, it is clear that the corporate centralization of global food supply means ‘efficient’ [...]