Organic food is filling the shelves and praised like never before, but often it might have travelled a long way before reaching the shelves in the stores. The question I wanted answered was how big an impact the so called food miles (the distance food travels from farm to plate) have on environment. Quite a few studies have been made to conclude if organic or local food is better. For example, a Swedish researcher took a closer look at a typical Swedish breakfast (apple, bread, butter, cheese, coffee, cream, orange juice, sugar). His calculations showed that the distance the breakfast travelled before reaching the breakfast table was approximately one turn around the Earth. A similar calculation was done in Iowa, USA. There the research team concluded that to make one cartoon of strawberry yoghurt the ingredients travelled about 3 550 km. At that point the ice cream hadn’t even left the factory. These numbers, together with the fact that transportation does release a lot of greenhouse gases (especially air and road transport), displays a real problem for the environment. However, to know the environmental impact of food isn’t as easy as calculating food miles. Transportation system and, as with organic food, the process of making the food might have an even greater impact on the environment. For example, potatoes trucked from 100 miles away might have a higher environmental impact than potatoes shipped by rail from 1000 miles away. Still, if looking at the big picture, the food miles only makes up a small part of the total environmental impact of products. DeWeerdt suggests making a life-cycle analysis for food instead of just looking at the food miles. When looking at the production it is obvious that beef and dairy products have some of the highest environmental impacts (see table below). When put shortly, what you eat has a bigger impact than the food miles. Ida Smedlund References:Caputo, V. Nayga Jr, R.M. Scarpa R. 2013. Food miles or carbon emissions? Exploring labelling preference for food transport footprint with a stated choice study. In Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 57, pp. 465-482.
DeWeerdt, S. 2013. Is Local Food Better? In World Watch Magazine, Volume 22 No. 3. SYKE. Article: Climate-friendly food. SYKE, Aalto-yliopisto, YTK, Ilmatieteen laitos. Read: 19.10.2016. https://ilmasto-opas.fi/en/ilmastonmuutos/hillinta/-/artikkeli/ab196e68-c632-4bef-86f3-18b5ce91d655/ilmastomyotainen-ruoka.html%2017.10.2016 |
Want to be an author?Write for us and we will publish your writing right here on our blog! It can be about anything related to environmental engineering Archives
May 2019
Categories
All
|