What Does Your Food Cost The Environment Articles | Food

By: Gita Smith

The following, by Adam Stein in the latest ORION Magazine, really caught my imagination. What if American supermarkets would do the same as this British supermarket chain?

"Organic fruit from Chile, grass-fed lamb from New Zealand, spring water from Fiji, and plastic toys from China all have one thing in common: they require a lot of fuel to make and to move from source to market. Food travels an average of fifteen hundred miles before it reaches an American plate. That ecological footprint is usually hidden from the consumer, who may only think about fuel consumption when standing at the gas pump. Tesco, the largest supermarket chain in Britain and one of the top five retailers in the world, aims to change that.

As part of a twenty-point plan to address climate change, Tesco will begin "carbon labeling" all seventy thousand products on its shelves. [WOW!] A carbon label is a bit like the calorie information that appears on packaged food, but Tesco's new labels will reveal the total amount of carbon dioxide created from the production, transport, and consumption of the goods it carries."

What a concept!
Would we, on the east coast or deep South, be as eager to buy the DOLE brand produce packed in plastic and shipped to us daily from California if we took into account the diesel fuel burned to get it here? Or the environmental cost of all that plastic?

It might turn us completely around in our thinking about how "good" a food is for us if we considered how much greenhouse gas was created in the process.

This summer, at least, I can do something about my food choices that will be "good" all around and fun, to boot. I'll be haunting the local farmer's markets and buying the fresh veggies and fruits grown in Alabama. And I'll be coaxing tomatoes out of the soil in my own backyard.

I doubt that Wal-Mart, Publix, Kroger or Winn-Dixie, the markets in my region, will take the same steps as Tesco. But I can at least control a few things in my own life to make my eco-footprint a little lighter on this earth.