Food Miles | What they are and why your food should have least miles on it?
What Are Food Miles
Food miles are the number of miles food travels before it reaches your dinner plate. In the modern connected world, food is grown somewhere and shipped to markets all around the globe, wherever it fetches high prices. This means that if you can afford, you will have access to food grown anywhere in the world, without having to even step out of your locality.
Take for example, your fruit bowl always has apples, even though you live in tropical areas where apples don’t grow. This is because apples travel from California or Kashmir to reach fruit bowls around the world. Typically, food miles are associated with over-centi-mile transportation, the carbon emissions, and the associated environmental damage. However, as you will see, food miles are not only damaging our planet but our health too!
Why Food Miles Are Not Good for Health
There is a lot of chatter everywhere about the damage food miles are doing to our environment and the local agrarian economies. These are legitimate and genuine concerns, but besides them, food miles are not good for your own health either. Here are some reminders as to why they are not so good for your health after all!
Gap Between Production & Consumption Times
When food clocks miles on it, it automatically means it has been through a lot of transit time. There is no transportation company in the world, yet, that fly’s food from the farms to your plate directly. So, after harvesting, the food waits in the warehouses, ports & holding areas, and for the last mile connectivity before it hits supermarkets near you. Also consider the number of days, weeks, months, or even years the food has waited between its harvest and consumption, depending upon the number of miles your food has traveled. Do you want to eat food which is so old?
Food Processing for Transportation & Preservation
Given the above, when food must travel long distances over long durations, processing and preservation is definitely required to keep it edible, rather sellable. That means your food is either full of chemical preservatives or has gone through temperature-based preservation for a long time. The food may seem fresh when it reaches you, but it is nothing compared to farm fresh harvest near you. This food has traveled a long distance in the air, over the ocean, or on land and just like you and me, it is also stressed after such a long travel.
Not Suited to Local Climate
When food travels to you from its place of origin, chances are that sometimes it may have traveled really long distances. Cereal, dry fruits, and exotic herbs for example, often travel across many time zones to reach their consumers. In cases, the food that grows on one side of the world under specific climatic conditions may not be suitable for consumption in other climates. People living in different climates adapt to those climatic conditions, including the available food in that climate. A food item coming from another climate especially if it is very different from yours may not be accepted very well by your digestive system.
Rice for example, takes longer to cook on higher altitudes due to less atmospheric pressure as compared to sea level. So over centuries & millennia, people living on high altitudes have discovered rice varieties that cook faster. When branded rice varieties from lower altitudes travel to these places, they don’t cook properly and can lead to many health problems. There are many more such examples. Exotic dry fruits often are produced on cold climates and people need to consume them there to keep warm. When dry fruits are consumed in warmer areas, they cause many problems like excessive body heat and other digestive ailments.
Degradation of Nutrients
The food that has waited in the warehouses traveled long distances, across different climates (despite being transported in climate-controlled conditions), starts to deteriorate and its nutrients get degraded. This food served on your plate halfway around the world does not have the same nutritional value as it did near its farm. You end up paying many more times for this food, which probably has less nutrients than anything else that was grown locally and costed you a fraction of what you paid for the food that came to you from a distance.
Potential For Diseases
It is very likely that the food that travels from one place to another carries pathogens in it. People and animals at the place of its origin may be immune to the diseases that those pathogens can potentially cause, but not the people or animals at its place of consumption. This poses a big health risk, worth considering.
Food Categories With Most Miles
There are some foods categories that often travel long distances because they are marketed around the world for their superiority. Fruits, cereals, exotic vegetables & herbs, processed foods, and certain spices fall in that category. There is no doubt some foods grow best in certain climatic conditions and are of the best quality.
Middle East for example, is a region that produces the best dates in world and Italy is known to produce the best olives. The amount of food quality degradation that takes place due to food miles also varies from category to category. Fresh foods degrade much more compared to dried foods that stay good even after a lot travel.
Conclusion
There are a lot of arguments in favor of food miles as well, like generation of uniform employment for farmers around the world and the availability of food around the world, which hold ground on their own merit. As a result, there is no definitive conclusion to this debate whether or not food miles should be encouraged.
Instead, it is a matter of personal choice, and this article gives you a perspective on the health implications of food miles, in addition to the most widely given argument about the environmental damage that these miles cause.
However one thing for sure is true, and that is that you must try to eat as much locally grown food as possible. Not only the planet, but your own body will thank you for that!!
