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.