It turns out to be better for the environment to truck in tomatoes from Spain during the winter, for example, than to grow them in heated greenhouses in Britain.
Any winter tomatoes are grown in greenhouses, even in Spain. OK, not heated as British greenhouses would be. But is this a real choice? Are there British greenhouse tomatoes on the market in any great quantity? What's better for the environment, anyway, is not only to consume local spacewise, but also timewise, in other words eat fruit and veg in season. Winter greenhouse tomatoes are rubbish. Why buy them? (Unless occasionally if you must).
it transpires that half the food-vehicle miles associated with British food are travelled by cars driving to and from the shops. Each trip is short, but there are millions of them every day.
Why, sure. So let's truck and fly food in, and people will stop driving to and from the supermarkets?
The whole point made about cars (an SUV with one salad aboard, or people driving around buying stuff from farms, etc) ignores of course that people who choose to buy local tend to be aware of these problems. One trip to farmers' market is better than several to local producers.
Research carried out at Lincoln University in New Zealand found that producing dairy products, lamb, apples and onions in that country and shipping them to Britain used less energy overall than producing them in Britain.
It would, wouldn't it? I have my doubts.
even if flying food in from the developing world produces more emissions, that needs to be weighed against the boost to trade and development.
Righty-ho. This is where we know we're reading The Economist.
As for food transportation, it looks to me that orgnized home delivery tours (may be internet purchases) have the potential to be more transporation efficient than everyone round-trip'ing to the supermarket (unless it is on work-home path).
If you go to google Defra and "food mile" you'll find a recent report showing that "food miles" are an inadequate indicator.
It's obvious that food miles is not the right unit since you need to take transporation mode and production inputs into account.
NZ study of the topic (PDF), seems to conclude that for some products it's vastly more energy-efficient to ship them to UK from NZ than to produce them in the UK.
Bliss!!
Now, I like this report, but would there be any interest here to do an audit of these findings? Are there elements missing, can we extend the given framework for other products?
Conscious man, conscious!
In the kiwi-case, I was thinking of an alternative kiwi produced somewhere closer to the Netherlands than NZ (which is probably Everywhere Else). That would make the description perhaps: less un-sustainable.
it's about having a sense of proportion, isn't it? ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Too bad that they didn't take kiwis as example...
But I like the set-up, very bookkeepish. It looks superior to considering just foodmiles as metric.
