Food Miles

Subject – Agriculture

Context – The trend of eating locally produced, seasonal foods that our previous generations swore by has been discarded by most of us.

Concept –

Food miles is the distance food is transported from the time of its making until it reaches the consumer.
Food miles are one factor used when testing the environmental impact of food, such as the carbon footprint of the food.
The more food miles that attach to a given food, the less sustainable and the less environmentally desirable that food is.
But the vast distances that food travels ‘from plough to plate’ makes it vulnerable to oil supply, inefficient on a per calorie basis, and unsustainable in the long run.
The transportation of food is about 12 per cent of the carbon cost of the food we eat.
‘Food miles’ is an important tool to assess and identify the sustainability of food production and consumption. It is measured in tonne-kilometres, calculated by multiplying the weight of food items in tonnes by the distance travelled in kilometres.
Road, air, rail and sea all contribute differently in the overall transport carbon emission — 60 per cent, 20 per cent, 10 per cent and 10 per cent respectively. Food transported via express fast air routes can have a 50 times higher carbon footprint than transporting food slowly via sea.