May 25th, 2007
Food for thought
A big factor for me when it comes to the food I eat is food “mileage”, meaning the gas and other resources it takes to produce and transport the food from the place it was grown/raised to my dinner table.
My conclusion:
Eating as many locally grown foods as possible + Eating less meat = Saving resources (fossil fuels, water, soil, forests)
But today on NPR I heard another very good reason to eat locally-produced foods: Tainted Chinese imports. These include fish raised in polluted water in China and imported to the U.S. Basically, the Chinese treat the fish from their pollutant-related illnesses by dumping veterinary antibiotics and antifungal drugs directly into their water. What happens is that we eat the fish, right along with those drugs, some of which are cancer-causing. Ingesting these drugs also contributes to the very serious and growing global problem of antibiotic resistance.
It is important to note that the FDA is now actually asking both consumers and food manufacturers in the U.S. not to rely on their inspections for food safety.
You may have heard of the term “globalization” before and not thought much about it. But the critical meaning in this context is that because of the U.S.’s now ever-expanding ability to import cheap food from overseas, the FDA has to work overtime to try to keep up and is facing a major struggle.
As excerpted from the NPR.org article:
The FDA normally inspects about 1 percent of all food and food ingredients at U.S. borders. It does tests on about half of 1 percent.
And official vigilance has been going down — for two reasons.
First, food imports have increased dramatically, from $45 billion in 2003 to $64 billion three years later.
Second, the “food” part of the FDA has been getting smaller.
Shaun Kennedy of the National Center for Food Protection and Defense says no country is increasing its food exports faster than China.
Not only can we help save fuel and water by buying locally, but it is also easier to hold local producers accountable to health standards.
Also, I just think it’s better to be able to (whenever possible) look squarely into the eyeballs of the very person who grew your tomatoes, canned your jelly or raised the chickens who laid your eggs. It’s something to think about.
May 25th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Hey Crystal! I agree, food miles are important. Did you see the Economist article a month ago or so? (http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8380592). It makes a few interesting points, like if you’re driving around to buy all your local food, which is being trucked in in small quantities also, you might end up with more food miles than produce that was on a big truck.
“The term “food mile” is itself misleading, as a report published by DEFRA, Britain’s environment and farming ministry, pointed out last year. A mile travelled by a large truck full of groceries is not the same as a mile travelled by a sport-utility vehicle carrying a bag of salad. Instead, says Paul Watkiss, one of the authors of the DEFRA report, it is more helpful to think about food-vehicle miles (ie, the number of miles travelled by vehicles carrying food) and food-tonne miles (which take the tonnage being carried into account).
The DEFRA report, which analysed the supply of food in Britain, contained several counterintuitive findings. It turns out to be better for the environment to truck in tomatoes from Spain during the winter, for example, than to grow them in heated greenhouses in Britain. And it transpires that half the food-vehicle miles associated with British food are travelled by cars driving to and from the shops. Each trip is short, but there are millions of them every day. Another surprising finding was that a shift towards a local food system, and away from a supermarket-based food system, with its central distribution depots, lean supply chains and big, full trucks, might actually increase the number of food-vehicle miles being travelled locally, because things would move around in a larger number of smaller, less efficiently packed vehicles.
Research carried out at Lincoln University in New Zealand found that producing dairy products, lamb, apples and onions in that country and shipping them to Britain used less energy overall than producing them in Britain. (Farming and processing in New Zealand is much less energy intensive.) And even if flying food in from the developing world produces more emissions, that needs to be weighed against the boost to trade and development. ”
Interesting, huh? Fortunately I can bike to my farmers’ market, but I suppose my least amount of food miles are from my basil and cilantro on the back porch!
May 25th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Whoa! This makes things all the more complicated. So until we have cars that run on biodiesel and have set up mass transit to the Farmer’s market, we’re still racking up the miles…
Still, I have to say that I prefer to know where my food was grown and that it doesn’t have lead paint chips or veterinary antibiotics in it. At the Farmer’s Market, we’re at least a little more likely to know the food is safe to eat.