Are we there yet?
How far will your dinner have travelled before it finds its way on to your plate this evening? And does it really make any difference if it has come from the other side of the world or the other side of the garden? More and more people are becoming convinced that the miles your food puts in are of singular importance and, in an unlikely alliance, environmentalists and some of the biggest retailers in the world have started working together to bring production closer to home.
The retailers have started investing heavily in lessening their carbon footprint, and with such enthusiasm that it is clear they now recognise that not only does an eco-friendly approach make sense, it makes money.
Much attention is being focused on food miles - the measure of the distance food travels from field to plate. According to the British department for the environment, food and rural affairs (Defra), food miles have been steadily increasing over the last three decades as our demand for strawberries in November, new potatoes in January and organic blueberries any time grows increasingly insatiable.
This year-round demand for out-of-season produce has led to food transport accounting for half the carbon-dioxide emissions of the food sector with processing, packaging and farming sharing the rest.
While there are critics of the food miles concept as a measure of the environmental impact of a food, it is self-evident that an awareness of how far the food you eat travels makes sense. Food eaten immediately after harvesting tastes better than food shipped halfway around the world, while some of the journeys our food is sent on in order to save producers money are, frankly, ridiculous.
One Scottish manufacturer ships prawns caught in the North Atlantic 8,000km to China to be hand-shelled by low-cost labour before bringing them back to Scotland to be breaded and sold as fresh local produce.
Fish caught off the Irish coast is often transported to Poland for processing, while potatoes, onions, carrots, tomatoes, courgettes, cauliflower and pretty much every other vegetable that can be grown here is both imported and exported in growing numbers.
Concerns over food’s carbon footprint have seen Marks & Spencer and Tesco in particular falling over themselves to promote their environmental responsibility in recent weeks.
Earlier this year, Marks & Spencer unveiled a €300 million “eco-plan”, which is admirably ambitious. Dubbed Plan A (”because there is no plan B”), it aims to make the company’s operations in the UK and Ireland completely carbon neutral within five years.
The company also aims to minimise energy use, maximise the use of renewables and is mobilising its suppliers to reduce their own carbon footprint. It has committed itself to buying as much food from the UK and Ireland as possible and will double its regional food sourcing within 12 months.
It also says it will minimise the amount of food it transports by air freight - by far the most environmentally destructive mode of transport - and will label the food imported by air as “flown”.
Not wanting to be left behind, Tesco Ireland, the biggest supermarket group in the country, plans to spend €30 million over the next five years in reducing its energy consumption by half - this is just a fraction of the total spend of its parent in the UK.
By 2010 there will be 100 per cent recycling of Tesco Ireland’s store waste and packaging, a move which will see more than 24,000 tonnes of waste recycled each year - equivalent to the waste generated by a town of 20,000 people. It also plans to build what it describes as the most environmentally friendly store in Ireland by 2009.
The chain also plans to trial composting in all of its stores and aims to reduce packaging on its own-label products by 25 per cent by 2010. It is also developing plans to publish details of the carbon footprint on the packaging of products it sells.
Despite this flurry of activity, environmental issues remain of peripheral concern to Irish consumers, according to research carried out by Glanbia Consumer Foods. A recent study found that Irish shoppers displayed a very low awareness of environmental issues, with only 24 per cent knowing what “food miles” meant. A slightly higher 30 per cent of people surveyed were aware of “carbon footprints”.
The move towards buying local produce and focusing on food miles is not entirely without negative consequences. Buying homegrown tomatoes that are grown under artificial light may actually be more damaging to the environment then buying tomatoes grown under sunlight in the south of Spain.
In New Zealand in particular, food producers are growing increasingly worried about the food miles concept: unsurprisingly, as it has the potential to destroy - or at least severely weaken - the country’s export business. Around a third of New Zealand’s food and drink exports are destined for EU markets 19,000km away.
“The concept of food miles is both flawed and too often promoted by those motivated by self-serving objectives rather than genuine environmental concerns,” New Zealand’s agriculture minister Jim Anderton said recently. “It is being used in Europe by self-interested parties trying to justify protectionism in another guise.” But then he would say that, wouldn’t he?
Hi Conor,
I read with particular interest your column this morning on food miles. Mainly because I think the suppliers(Tesco, M&S, Supervalu) and the consumer are focusing in the wrong place with the relatively abstract idea of “food miles” and “carbon footprint”. They are concentrating on the wrong areas when implementing environmentally friendly policies. Tesco you noted are targeting 100% recycling of their store waste. But at the same time more and more of their vegetables and meats are only available pre-packaged and many Tesco stores in particular no longer even have a butcher counter with an option of purchasing meat with minimal packaging. M&S probably have the most overpackaged product range of any supermarket chain, it looks nice though!
I think we need to re-examine the basic environmental slogan - “reduce, reuse, recycle”. And start with the reduce.
Whats wrong with buying meat straight from the butchers counter, with a single bag to wrap it instead of a getting a plastic tray of pre-cut meat? Whats wrong with picking your veg from a box of loose veg instead of getting a plastic tray and plastic wrapping?
I shop in Supervalu. In my local supervalu I have recently noted the move to mostly pre-packed veg and very few veg are now offered loose to the consumer. The consumer looses out in three ways: choice, the extra work involved in recycling the extra unnecessary packaging and surprisingly often very significantly in cost.
My local store for instance no longer sells loose ginger. My choice is limited by this as in every single package of ginger on display last Friday when I did my shopping there was one nice large knob of ginger and a few unusable scraps thrown in to make up the required weight. I am paying for the unusable ginger and I have to recycle all the packaging or else add it to my pay-by-weight rubbish.
Last Friday, there were three options when buying carrots(often there arent three options as the loose carrots are very often not available). I could buy loose carrots, I could buy a bag of carrots or I could buy a tray of carrots. The environmentally friendly option was the loose carrots, I could choose each carrot and ensure I was getting the best quality available, the loose carrots were Irish and the freshest of the three. They were also 1.23 per kilo. The bags of carrots were 1.49 per kilo and from Israel, most bags had one or two carrots I wouldnt purchase given the option. The trays of carrots were a whopping 2.23 per kilo and again from Israel.
Parsnips loose were 2.43 per kilo and the same parsnpis in bags were 3.43 per kilo. Both were from Spain and of similar quality.
(The prices may be a few pence out, I noted them and promptly lost the note! However there was more than a 1 euro difference between the loose carrots and the most expensive and exactly a 1 euro difference between the two options on parsnips).
The money saved on making the right choices in purchase of just two items - a kilo of carrots and a kilo of parsnips would purchase a lot of plastic shopping bags at 15 cent each!!! Yet most people choose the bag or tray, or dont complain when loose veg are not available but would not contemplate purchasing their plastic shopping bags each week.
I have challenged the staff in Supervalu on this only to be told that it is Musgraves policy to move towards more prepacked vegetables and they have no say in the matter.
Its very annoying as a consumer to be taken for a ride by supermarkets making headlines about their environmentally friendly policies yet providing the consumer with less and less environmentally friendly choices - and charging them more for it!
The debate on lamb prices last week also highlighted an area where the debate about “food miles” is detracting from the core issues for the consumer. On Morning Ireland a representative of the food industry showed graphically how the farmer and the consumer are both losing out because of this move to centrally-slaughtered, pre-packaged meat products. He outlined the costs involved in getting lamb to the table - transport to the slaughter house, the slaughter-house cut of the profit, transport to the meat packaging plant, their cut, transport to the big super market depot, transport to the individual stores, the supermarket(cash-and-carry) cut, the stores cut. Then there is the administration cost of the food safety measures, traceability and so on. Meanwhile lamb is expensive and the farmer is making so little profit that the Irish lamb industry is in danger as farmers cut-out. Now, heres where the “food miles” debate can lock-in. If Irish lamb industry fails then we will potentially be sourcing our lamb from New Zealand adding the extra transport costs to the eventual price paid by the consumer.
What would be so wrong with going back to a system of in-store butchers, who take their delivery from local slaughter houses, cut-out all those extra middle-men, make sure the farmer gets a fair price out of the eliminated additional costs and ensuring the consumer gets local fresh produce, with the benefit of knowing where it came from and knowing that the meat has been freshly butchered for them? And its not packaged in unnecessary additional packaging that lets face it the consumer also pays for.
I think if the current debate was moved away from the abstract concepts of “food miles” and “carbon footprints” and back to concepts that are immediately relevant to all consumers and a discussion around who is actually paying for extra unneeded packaging it would show how the consumers pocket is being hit at the register and again with the additional costs we pay for the management of the extra waste. The issues become more real to the consumer and the choices can be better informed.
Comment by Marie Murphy | May 28, 2007 at 2:26 pmMarie, if you want to buy loose fruit and veg the best bet is your local vegetable shop.
Comment by Grainne Gillespie | July 2, 2007 at 11:15 pmOur’s is great, most fruit/veg is available loose, the only thing we buy pre-packed are bags of rocket for our pet iguana (and that’s bought less in the summer now that the dandelions (lovely free iguana food) are here)