The 50 Thousand Kilometer Salad
The environmentalists have been accusing us meat eaters of destroying the environment. Therefore I had a very good conscience while preparing yesterday dinner which was simple salad consisting of vegetables and a little bit of tuna fish. That is until I started reading the packaging and saw where the ingredients came from.
I did a quick and dirty calculation with InfoPlease's distance calculator. Air distance between Oslo and the countries or place noted on the packages. This does not include the fact that many are probably transported indirectly by trucks/boats and/or to multiple storage areas before reaching my plate. I am also not counting in the tomatoes, the lettuce, and the eggs which were produced in Norway and would probably add few hundred kilometers to the sum. Oh and I am conveniently forgetting about the nice Spanish bottle of wine consumed with the salad...
Olive oil from Italy = 1905.9 km
Avocados from South Africa = 10062.9 km
Tuna fish from Thailand = 8534.4 km
Pepper from Indonesia = 11551.1 km
Salt from Gothenburg 254.9 km
The absolute winner was:
Onion from New Zealand = 17707.3 km
This means that my salad travelled at least 50016,5 km before it entered my mouth!
I don't know how to compare this to a slap of beef but something tells me that this isn't exactly very kind to planet earth either. While I am not environmentally friendly enough to start dropping ingredients on these basis I am making one promise. I will try to buy things grown closer when possible. I will at least try to find onion grown somewhere closer than New Zealand of all places.
So how far did you salad travel?
Hmmm...
I thought the "food miles" idea had been debunked, see here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/opinion/06mcwilliams.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
You need to factor in the means of production, not just the distance travelled. Some countries manage to produce ingredients a lot more enviro-efficiently.
What's even more interesting is when you compare the emissions due to shipping the food in bulk, versus the emissions of everybody getting into their car to drive to the supermarket to buy the stuff.
;)
I wish I had more data!
Yes, it makes sense that this cannot be only measured in kilometers or miles . I got a bit skeptical though when I saw that New Zealand did those calculations... the nation that is probably the furthest away from most parts of the world that are rich enough to buy imported goods:)
What would be nice if someone started giving us more calculations about the various factors so that we can start to think about this logically. Until that we have to focus on something simple such as how far your food travelled or that is is a cow vs a carrot :) .
I wish I could see the big picture
Hmmm, so much for fresh fish in fish sticks :-/
My meat is usually Norwegian... or so I would like to believe. I do occasionally drive to Sweden to buy some meat (because it is cheaper and sometimes better). Shame on me! Today I was told that Swedish beef is quite bad in comparison with some other more free range beef produced at the other side of the planet. I am not environmentally friendly at all when it comes to food. I however would like to get a little bit better. I agree that it probably doesn't make sense to start warming up green houses to produce vegetables that require warm climate but I still refuse to believe we need to go to the other side of the planet to get onion... New Zealand isn't even on the list top ten producers of onions in the world.
I see the point that it could be bad for the poorer countries if we stopped buying food from them... but it also makes me think that maybe food prices would go down in those countries and people would be able to afford their food... It probably doesn't work like that though :(
Cheap Swedish meat
I'd just like to rub it in what great deals I made on meat products last week. My food store had a big surplus of various barbeque meat with short best before dates. Some examples:
Flintastek Tex-Mex (seasoned ham with a lot of rind) : 15 SEK/kg
Pepper steak from Ireland (beef) : 19 SEK/kg
Barbeque spit Sweet Chili (ham): 30 SEK/kg
Traktörstek (luxurious ham sprinkled with apples etc): 39 SEK/kg
Variation of the above but made from beef: 49 SEK/kg
The two previous ones had cost some 130-150 SEK/kg before but due to the short date they were dropped a lot in price.
*burp* It feels good to be a meat eater and not to worry about the environment.
:-P (I'm partly kidding, partly serious)
Hungry!
LOL!
You made my mouth water and my wallet feel empty...
But come to think of it I only ate meat bought in Sweden this weekend. To make up for it I did eat some Norwegian grown onion :)
Real ham and Norwegian shrimps
There was a pizzeria here who used to market themselves for having real ham and Norwegian shrimps. I still find it funny when read together, like the Norwegian ones aren't real shrimps.
Today I'm eating home-grown apples, a lot of them because there is season and my parents after 30+ years of trying finally managed to get apple trees that bear fruit. How I would not have loved to pick ripe apples from the tree when I was a kid. However we used to buy fruit cheap from people who had surplus. Sometimes you were allowed to pick up fruit from the ground and sometimes from the branches.
I tend not to study my
I tend not to study my ingredients *that* closely :) A slightly different question: when you eat meat, it is locally produced?
BTW, transport can be an important factor, but so is heating. Growing paprikas under the Spanish sun and then shipping them here is likely to be causing less carbion emission in total than growing them in a heated greenhouse in the Netherlands. Same for some other vegetables: sometimes the right thing to do would be to get local produce in the summer, and southern produce in the winter. Getting beans flown in from Kenya is never a good idea. Carbon-wise that is, the farmers in Kenya probably think it is a great idea.
Fiskpinnar
Reminds me of the transportation of fish to China to make fishsticks, see this map.