Food Miles & Seasonal Food by Jane Thurnell-Read

One of my tests for the saneness of any belief or theory, is does it make sense if I come at it from at least two totally different perspectives?

Here’s an example of a sane idea!

There’s been a lot in the press (at least in the UK) about the polluting effects of airplanes and how far food is travelling by air to fuel our desires.  In a supermarket survey, the UK Food Commission has found bottled water that has travelled more than 10,000 miles (16,000km) to reach UK consumers. (No, be patient – I’m not suggesting this is a sane idea!)

We eat fresh fruit out of season, complain if our supermarket does not have our favourite vegetable in stock for most of the year. As a consequence of this food is flown in from distant countries or it may be grown nearer to home in hot houses, so that we can have an abundance of choice at any time of the year. Neither makes sense in terms of the effect on the environment or in terms of our health and happiness. 

The food system now accounts for between a third and 40 per cent of all UK road freight, producing pollution and noise and increasing the risk of road accidents. www.sustainweb.org  has estimated that for every calorie of carrot, flown in to the UK from South Africa, we use 66 calories of fuel, and that the ingredients for an air-freighted Sunday lunch created 37 kilograms of greenhouse gasses but when bought from local farms only 58.2 grams of greenhouse gasses were released – a reduction of 99.8 per cent. Freight, both road and air, makes a massive contribution to global warming, buying local food that has not been artificially raised can help reduce that effect.

Food that has been brought in from a long distance may also be deficient in some nutrients. For example, water soluble vitamins (B-group and C) are more unstable than fat soluble vitamins (K, A, D and E) during food processing and storage.  This means that one of the important vitamins that can help protect you against cancer and the ageing process (vitamin C) is likely to be less in food that has travelled a long way to get to you. The B vitamins help us deal with stress and anxiety; we need all of those we can get. Local food is likely to be more nutritious, healthy food.

We were not designed - we did not evolve -  to eat the same food continuously throughout the year. The hunter-gatherer template on which we are based belongs to a land of glut and scarcity. We too live in a land of glut, but hardly ever in a land of scarcity. The rise in allergies and food intolerances may well be, at least in part, attributable to the fact that we eat the same things all the time, whereas our ancestors would have had long periods when some foods were not available.

An increase in happiness could also be linked to buying local food! As a child I remember waiting for the first strawberries, being excited by the new season’s small potatoes and so on. Now we deprive ourselves of these simple pleasures by insisting on having access to a large range of foods all the time. We search for high sugar, highly processed food to titillate our jaded taste buds, when a little self-restraint could bring bursts of intense pleasure as we eat food in its prime, in season, after a few months without.  

Eating local food in season is a sane idea. It makes sense from so many different perspectives – health, happiness and the environment.

You may not feel able to source everything locally, but make a start. Think about the things that taste really good in season, and make a resolution to eat one or two of those only in season. If you still want to buy coffee from Africa and bananas from the West Indies, go for fair-traded, preferably organic produce that will help those countries too.