Reduce Your Dinner's Food Miles
I recently wrote about the exploits of Manny Howard, who attempted to grow all of the food he needed for his family of four in his 20 x 40 foot Brooklyn backyard. And while Manny’s experiment went beyond the limits of extreme, it was indicative of the growing national trend to eat locally.
Eating locally is not a new idea, in fact, the opposite is true. When my grandmother wanted tomatoes in the winter, she reached into her cupboard and opened a jar that she canned over the summer. It never would have crossed her mind to order tomatoes from Israel for her holiday menu. Yet today, my local grocery store gives me access to any type of produce I want, regardless of the season or my locality. And this access comes at a hefty price to the environment.
According to the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, “the vast majority of energy used in the U.S. food system (around 80 percent) goes to processing, packaging, transporting, storing, and preparing food.”
In 2001, the Leopold Center created a paper called “Food, Fuel and Freeways,” that tracked the distance that 30 items of produce travelled to get to the average Iowans table. According to the Leopold Center, “fresh produce transported to Iowa consumers under the current conventional food system travels longer distances, uses more fuel, and releases more CO2 than the same quantity of produce transported in a local or Iowa-based regional food system.” Check out the following graphic to see a summary of their results*.
So what does all of this mean for you and your family? It means that you need to think twice about the foods you choose to bring home from the store. Even produce that is grown organically will cause unnecessary environmental damage if it must be flown from overseas, or trucked across the country to get to your kitchen table. Here are a few great ways to reduce the carbon footprint of your next meal:
- Check out Sustainable Table for a state-by-state list of seasonal produce availability. It’s a great opportunity to teach your kids about the types of foods that grow in your area and the seasons they prefer to grow in.
- Talk to your school officials about the Farm To School Program that benefits local farmers while providing fresh fruits and vegetables to schools.
- Plan a 100-mile party with your friends; a potluck where you all bring dishes prepared with foods found within 100 miles of your home.
* Information for this chart is based on the weighted average source distance, a single distance figure that combines information on distances from production source to consumption or purchase endpoint. For these calculations, USDA Agricultural Marketing Service arrival data for 1998 were used to identify production origin (state or country). Distances from production origin to Chicago were estimated by using a city located in the center of each state as the production origin, and then calculating a one-way road distance to Chicago using the Internet site Mapquest (mapquest.com). Estimations do not include distance from the Chicago Terminal Market to point of retail sale.
Source: Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, “Food, Fuel and Freeways” by Rich Pirog, Timothy Van Pelt, Kamyar Enshayan and Ellen Cook. Graphics by Matt Miller.
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