Your dinner: A journey around the globe

This is a fantastic story on food miles, quite sickening really;

“Food Miles in Australia: A Preliminary study of Melbourne, Victoria” researched and written by Asha Bee Abraham and Sophie Gaballa estimates the distances travelled for food items found in a typical Melburnian’s shopping basket and the resulting greenhouse emissions from this transportation.

“The study revealed that food items like oranges, sausages, tea, baked beans etc with ingredients sourced from overseas have seen more of the world than most people. In fact, the report estimates that the total distance travelled by 29 of our most common food items is 70,803 km—that’s nearly two times the distance around the Earth!

“Calculating road transport alone, our shopping basket has still travelled 21,073 km, almost the whole way around Australia’s coastline. The resulting greenhouse gas emissions estimate for all food transporting trucks carrying these 25 items on any given day is the equivalent of 4,247 cars driving for a whole year! And that’s just for one shopping basket of 25 items.

 

[Source]

Those figures really are alarming, especially when the solution is so very simple….

If you are wondering, yes that is a picture of part of my personal veggie garden. Let’s think about this for a second… an almost 9000km journey if you purchase your food from the supermarket, or a 20 metres walk from your backyard? What really gets me is why more people don’t do this! It is dead simple and many houses come with a lot of wasted room in the form of big green, resource intensive lawns. Despite the obvious environmental benefits, few will disagree if I said that home grown organic food hands down beats anything you can buy in the supermarket when it comes to taste. So what is stopping you!