How far has your breakfast travelled?

Andrew Leong-Murphy - Senior Language Instructor, Center for Languages and Professional Development, USJ

I was sitting down for breakfast last week, when I suddenly realised how far my food had travelled. The cereal was from the UK. The milk was from Australia. The cup of tea, however, was the best travelled; the tea bag was from the UK, made with Indian tea. This meant that the tea had travelled from India to the UK. It had then been packaged, and sent back over to Macau. Oh, and the milk was also from Australia.
Think of the amount of energy used to get my breakfast onto the table. Think of the amount of pollution it has caused! This is something that is unavoidable, to some degree, in Macau. How much food is actually grown here? But what effect is this having on the environment, something which is important given Macau’s pollution issues.
The concept of measuring the distance that food travels from the place it is produced to the dinning room table, where it is consumed, is know as ‘Food Miles’. The basic idea is that the further that food travels, the worse it is in terms of pollution. Surely it is better to eat food grown locally rather than import it from the other side of the world?
However, is the answer this simple? Remember that many foods and drinks cannot be, or are not, produced locally. If you want to eat chocolate, you need to import the basic ingredients – unless you live near where they grow. If you want a bottle of wine, and you don’t live in a wine growing area, you need to import it. The choice, therefore, is to accept the ‘food miles’, or to not eat/drink the products at all.
The really difficult question is the importation of food that can be produced locally. Surely it is better to eat food produced locally rather than import it from half way around the world?
Again, the answer is more complex. It is important to remember that a large amount of the pollution is caused during the actual production of the food; the extra pollution caused by the travelling is the smaller proportion. This means, therefore, that the efficiency of the production process is very important. If food is grown abroad in a much more environmentally friendly way than a local product, you cannot just say that the local product is the best for the environment because it has fewer food miles.
It is even more complex when you consider food being sold ‘out of season’. If you grow the fruit (say, apples, for example) locally, and store them for sale in the future (out of season), the storing actually causes pollution as well. This makes the food miles for the product to be a less accurate test of environmental friendliness than you might think.
Choosing your food and drink, therefore, is a complex matter! If you want a big variety of foods to choose from, in and out of season, then you have to accept that some of them will have travelled a long way. Also, even with some of the food that can be produced locally, the comparative environmental cost isn’t as simple as just checking the atlas for the distance that it has travelled.

©MDTimes/University of Saint Joseph