Think your food’s local? Count up the number of trips it takes to put it on your plate

[marmar]

from NOW Toronto:



Trucking trouble
Think your food’s local? Count up the number of trips it takes to put it on your plate

By Wayne Roberts


My first job, every Saturday was as a bicycle delivery boy for Joe Caruso’s grocery store in – I still grimace at the memory – a hilly area of Scarborough.

As it turns out, bike delivery jobs could be heading for a major revival as one the best ways to handle the trickiest of industrial transportation challenges: “the last mile,” with its extra burden of fossil fuel use.

My trip back in time was occasioned by a two-weekend assignment (for less pay than I made as a delivery boy) as the “food expert” on a panel of a dozen bold planning and design thinkers, food producers and consumer activists working to reduce heavy traffic in the food system – all under the discipline of an in-house moderator riding herd on ideas that got too grandiose.

The project, hosted by Evergreen Foundation, George Brown College’s Institute Without Boundaries and Metrolinx, kicked off coincidentally just a few weeks before November 28’s opening of the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban. Everything we discussed had powerful emissions implications. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=184136

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[MineralMan]

2. Eating is very costly in the industrialized world.

Most people live in large population centers or in suburbs around them. That means that the truly local area simply cannot produce enough food to feed the people living there. It's impossible. So every bite they take comes from somewhere else, and must be transported to them. There's no alternative, really. This is why people dreaming of locally grown food are doing just that - dreaming. The amount of food that is consumed in even a mid-sized city is enormous, and it all has to come from somewhere else. A very heavy carbon debt is the result.

[BanzaiBonnie]

3. TIme to tear down part of the cities so food can be grown?

I'm sure there's a way we can do this.

[saras]

5. There's no reason the food can't come from the bioregion the city is in.

That also puts a sensible sustainability limit on the size of cities. It also ensures that all the transportation involved is ALSO local business.

But we'll have to change a lot of colonial eating habits.

[dballance]

4. For Part of My Life I grew up on a farm

We had a really small garden but we produced more tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and other vegetables than our family of 6 could ever eat. My mom canned some of the best green beans I've ever had. We ate out of our garden and canned things for the winter.

We can sustain ourselves without factory farms and the big Monsantos in the world.

We never used genetically modified seeds because we didn't have to. I raised acres of soybeans so don't tell me we need the genetically modified patented crap they're selling.

Just raise food using natural methods that enhance production. A little fertilizer - manure is good. We can feed everyone that way if we actually commit to it.

Yes, climate and soil do make a difference so don't flame me please.