Food Miles
- November 16, 2021
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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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.