“Food miles” (the distance that your food has traveled before consumption) has become a hot topic as the threat of global warming has loomed larger. But is this the right thing to focus on? New research in now emerging arguing that while food miles can be worth noting, they miss the whole story. An
op-ed in the New York Times by James E. McWilliams brings this to light thanks to a study from Lincoln University in New Zealand:
Instead of just counting the miles from production to your plate, the researchers counted everything they could put a number to, and got some surprising results:
Most notably, they found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. Similar figures were found for dairy products and fruit.
So maybe the key isn’t necessarily only eating locally, but eating carefully and asking the right questions about how the food was produced. Nobody ever said eating environmentally would be easy!