Thinking About Where the Food Comes From

One step in sustainability awareness comes in thinking about how far food travels to your market.

Here's a good primer:

"Almost all of what you and I eat comes to us from far away -- the average distance being about 1,200 miles."

A couple of years ago I decided to stop buying, for example, grapes from Chile. Grapes don't grow close to where I live in Seattle (concords, maybe, late in the summer, but that's about it), so they're always going to have to make a bit of a hike to my doorstep. But Chile seems beyond the pale.

I think others are coming to the same conclusion. A big indicator was last Christmas, when (from what I could tell) black cherries from Chile didn't sell well. Cherries at Christmas — now whose idea was that? In any case, they pretty much rotted in PCC's food co-op and Whole Foods didn''t seem to be moving 'em much.

There's a tradeoff here, to be sure. As I've mentioned, our household tries to buy fresh rather than packaged. And I love fruit. So yes, if I'm going to eat oranges and grapefruit, I'm going to increase my "carbon footprint" some.

But in a few weeks, local berries and fruit will be coming in. During the summer, my carbon footprint shrinks by a few toes' worth. Wish I could say the same for the entire year.

— Paul Andrews, GreenForGood

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