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How Far Does Your Food Travel?
Submitted by Thomas Czermak on June 27, 2007 - 1:22pm.
How far does your food travel?
Great video and article about the vast amounts of energy and resource consumed by our travelling food. All the more reasons to eat locally harvested food.
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Where do I see myself mostly fitting in as far as making it a better habitat in my region?
Agriculture and Food Security
11%
City Finances / Services
0%
Economy
0%
Environment
21%
Health
4%
Social
46%
Energy
0%
Security
0%
Transportation
7%
Small business / local business
11%
Total votes: 28
Interesting video.
Interesting video. Congratulations to the ones that had the idea of making it. When I first saw the topic I started laughing. I thought it was a joke, but it's not... Cool!
How much land is required?
Hi Thomas, got a question for you.
How much land would be required to exclusively locally feed all of London? I've done the calcuation. Because we have such a short growing season, each person requires 1 acre of land to grow a year's worth of food. Including the surrounding population and "waste" land not farmable, you would need an area 33 miles in radius around the city. That would over lap Windor's needs on the west, and KW etc, needs on the east. Thus there is not enough physical land around us to feed us all year. (This is not including The Golden Horshoe).
Second, it would also mean that grocery stores would only have preserved foods for the most part for 10 months of the year. No fresh lettus, no fresh tomatoes, etc. Plus include all the processed foods on the shelves would not be available.
Though wanting to feed ourselves locally is a worthy suggestion, the problem is there are just too many people today, which makes it physically impossible to feed ourselves locally.
Richard
No one is ahead of their time, just the rest of humanity is slow to catch on
Hello Richard,London's top
Hello Richard, London's top soil is still very rich, even within the city's urban areas. Havana is now the quintessence of urban agriculture. Virtually every square inch of available space is now taken up with green growth. However, with a population the size of Havanas' there is no possibility for it to become totally self-sufficient. Now even if we were to maximize urban framing, plus agriculture from the surrounding region of London, I don't think we'd meet our food needs. But that's assuming two things: a) That we would need to only rely on local agriculture. If peek-oil hits soon, this does not mean that all transportation ceases to exist, just that it, along with virtually every oil-dependent manufacturing process/byproduct, will become much more expensive (most petro-chemical byproducts, such as plastic bags, will become obsolete). and b) That we need to consume/waste as much as we do. I highly recommend George Monbiots' latest book ("Heat") and his blog (http://www.monbiot.com/). Also, check out http://www.postcarbonlondon.ca. There you'll find lots of info about how what we need to do in the coming years, is not simply cut out all of technology's benefits, but find ways to reduce, reuse and recyce BEFORE we consume/waste. I posted the link above simply as a chance for some people to become a little more aware of how much travel time food (from the regular groccery store) takes to get here. This is to encourage people to buy locally more often, not totally. That like you've pointed out, would likely be impossible, especially with the current infrastructure of our city. Thanks for your response.
Most are not aware of the scope
Thank you for the rational reply. Indeed, people do not understand the scope of what it takes to get the food that ends up on the table. They don't know what it takes to grow the food, where it comes from, how it gets to the table, or how much land is needed to feed them. They just go to the store and get what they want, with no thought of anything before it got there. Hence, yes expose the transportation (such as flying pineapples half way around the world to be sold for $4 each, and cherries from Chili in the middle of winter.) They also need to know the size of the land it would take if they had to feed themselves.
I was horrified to learn that west of London apple orchards are being taken down because it's cheeper to truck apples in from Mexico. Since it takes decades to get apple trees into full production, a move back to local will have a huge lag time.
Peak oil is going to be a major shake up. It will not only make food far more expensive, and hence put more demand on local production, it will cripple the economy. But the local food production will be a major problem. If more and more people start to move to local production (very few would be able to preserve for a year's storage), which will put pressure on local farms since it is physically impossible to feed everyone locally, and start bidding wars.
I've started a garden for the first time in 25 years. It's damn hard work, and lots of mistakes (and lots of loss to rabbit and birds, and weeds), so experimenting with methods to grow more in smaller spaces, grow with reduced weeds, etc. Plan to put in a drip irrigation fed by our well. But that will have to be later. Not everyone can do this or is even motivated to do it now while one can experiment. Most will leave it until it's too late.
Richard
No one is ahead of their time, just the rest of humanity is slow to catch on