Does your Christmas Dinner cost the Earth?

It happens every year and yet every year it takes me by surprise. I'm talking about the moment when the brochures and leaflets of the big supermarkets are pushed through the letter box, advertising all the must-have products for this year's Christmas dinner. It always feels too soon. The last Christmas wasn't that long ago. The next surprise is the products that are advertised, and I'm not only referring to foie gras and the amazing fact that this is still sold and bought freely.

Every year, it seems that the season to be jolly turns more and more into the season to be folly. Or even not into a proper season at all. After all, who would ever associate melons, strawberries or lettuce in every shape, colour and size with winter?

Imagine for a second the following scenario: you want to compose your Christmas dinner, using the advertised out-of-season products and you are going to collect them yourself. So you fly to Spain for melons, Kenya for strawberries, Egypt for green beans, etc… You'd be exhausted. And broke. Your collected food miles would leave you, in short, in more or less the same shape as our planet is in now.

Food miles are the measure of distance food travels from the field to our plate. These travels add substantially to the emission of carbon monoxide, which contributes to climate change. Food travels further these days, partly because the centralised systems of supermarkets have gradually taken over from local and regional markets. In plain English: a bottle of milk or a sack of potatoes can be transported many kilometres to be packaged at a central depot and then sent many kilometres back to be sold near the place where they were first produced. Also, because of the way the food processing industry works, ingredients travel around a country from factory to factory, before they make their way to the shops.

Then there's the imported produce. Strawberries, for instance, are flown in from warmer climates, and air freight has a much bigger impact on the environment than sea or road travel. The result is already noticeable: a concrete example is lake Naivasha in Kenya, which is a magnet for wildlife. The lake is drying out because of our appetite for year round products. One of the largest populations of hippopotamuses in Africa is under threat because of it. According to scientists, the lake may be nothing more than a putrid, muddy pond and most of the hippos could be dead within five years. In the past two years, hippo numbers have already slumped by more than 25% because of the fall in water levels. Water from the lake, which is the second largest in Kenya, ensures that the surrounding landscape is the most fertile in the country, sustaining some of the largest flower and vegetable farms in the world. Cut flowers, strawberries and beans are the main industry.

But it's not just the fact that we've become spoilt in our choice of food that has such a major impact. In the last fifty years, there have been major changes in the way food is produced. There's the increased globalisation of the food industry with higher imports and exports and an ever wider sourcing of food within one country and abroad. Another change is the concentration of the food supply base into fewer, larger suppliers. The delivery patterns are different as well, with most goods now routed through the supermarkets' regional distribution centres. Another reason for mounting food miles is comparative labour costs which leads to absurd situations where food is sent to a country with low labour costs for processing, then sent back to the originating country to be sold. And food does seem to travel extensively. When the dioxine food crises broke out in Belgium at the end of the 90ies, and all Belgian products faced an international ban, it was amazing to see which countries banned Belgian products. On the other hand – because eggs were amongst the contaminated products – it took all of one day to find Italian eggs in the shops.

So how easy is it to shop green? One way would be, so it seems, to buy organic food. After all, organic farming cuts down on the fossil fuels used to manufacture and transport of the chemicals that are used in mainstream agriculture. A very important aspect of the environmental cost of food that should not be ignored. Unfortunately though, this isn't a fail-safe option. I know this from experience. For years in my family, we picked up our weekly delivery of the organic boxes. These contain organically grown fruit and veg. Despite the fact that the boxes always contained produce which was in season, some of it was imported from neighbouring countries. So the food was without a doubt organic, but the overall production was definitely not green. Research has shown that a typical basket of 26 imported organic foods may have travelled the distance of six times around the equator. One of the researchers behind the food miles study, Professor Jules Pretty of the University of Essex, says food miles are much more important in terms of environmental impact than thought.

So can buying local solve the problem? Maybe, although of course food miles aren't the only way to measure the environmental impact on the food we eat. Reports show that it is less environmentally friendly to grow tomatoes in, say the UK than it is to import them from Spain. The energy that is needed to heat glass houses in the UK is significantly more than the energy used in transporting tomatoes from Spain, where no heating is used because of the warmer climate.

What is then the best choice for the consumer with good intentions? To quote one of them: "Should I go local, go organic or go and forget about it?"

A spokesperson for "Friends of the Earth" reckons a combination of the two – to buy organic and local – would be a good solution. Consumers could also demand better choices from the local supermarkets, shops and suppliers. So organic box schemes with food coming from local food cooperatives or farmers markets would indeed seem like the way forward. Then the question is, of course, whether supporting local food initiatives doesn't create the danger of pulling up a so-called ethical trade barrier?

And the next inevitable question is: why we are only talking about food miles when a lot of other products – cars, toys, clothes – also travel the world before we can spend our hard-earned cash on them.

There is a lot we are still in the dark about.


Sources:
DEFRA
Friends of the Earth
ISIS
The Times