What is the 100-mile food diet?
Credit: Wikimedia/Mabel
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The reaction to this profligate globalism is the 'locavore' movement, also known as the 100-mile diet.
This is a consumer backlash that began in California and encourages people to eat food exclusively from a 100 mile (160 km) radius of their home.
The idea is to reduce food miles and increase awareness of seasonality.
The movement has its roots in the hippy counter culture of the 1970s, out of which sprang the Berkeley eaterie Chez Panisse - Alice Waters' benchmark restaurant that champions local Californian produce.
In 2005 a group of San Francisco friends took the concept of eating locally to the web.
Sage Van Wing, one of the original founders of the 'locavore' movement, says it's about "finding food that comes from farmers who are looking after the land, finding food that is healthier to eat because you know the farmer who has grown it to proper organic standards, and eating food that comes from farmers where the workers are looked after".
The flip-side is giving up anything not grown locally - which, for most of the western world, involves sugar, tea, spices and coffee and, to a lesser extent, beer and wine.
At Home
Although no Australian locavore movement exists formally, some of people participate by buying food from local farmers' markets and turning our backs on imported products.
Australians living in all capital cities could give the 100-mile diet a good go as our cities, to varying extents, are surrounded by arable land.
One Melbourne restaurateur, Paul Mathis, has put his money where his ethics are and opened his 100 Mile Café in July 2007.
Some 95 per cent of the food served comes from within a 160 km radius of the Melbourne CBD (although he does sell French Champagne).
Apart from tropical spices and beverages, the two hardest items for an Australian locavore to come by are bread and beer. Except for Adelaide and Perth, the major grain belts lie outside the 160 km radius of our cities, making local wheat for bread and barley for beer very hard to come by.
For more information go www.locavores.com or www.100milediet.org.
Comments
It is true that the carbon embodied in food comes mainly from food production - agriculture and food processing - rather than the transportation of food. This was stated in what is probably the only research into the topic - the CERES report, Food Miles in Australia. Agriculture is an oil-intensive industry, and this can include organic agriculture too.
Regarding food transportation and the localisation of the urban food supply, I understand that the CSA (community supported agriculture) enterprise, Food Connect, in Brisbane, has found that a region out to five hours drive from the city is necessary to provide a varied urban food supply to its members. This, then, provides a indication of the radius of a localised food system. Food Connect is shortly to open in Sydney.
Here, the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance (www.sydneyfoodfairness.org.au) promotes a localised food system for purposes of nutritional health, the economic viability of Sydney region farmers and market gardeners and for the security of the urban food supply.
Rather than rely on only local foods, most people find the substitution of food imported into the region with those locally produced to be the most practical strategy or sustainable eating. The problem, however, comes in identifying what is a local food. What we need is a labeling scheme that applies a logo to local foods.
Russ Grayson, Sydney Food Fairness Alliance/Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network
eating local is reasonable idea, but it is based on the assumption that the major contribution to the total carbon footprint of our food comes from transportation.
unfortunately, this isn't true. the only situation in which it is really bad is air-freight and this is rare.
a recent study done in the US showed that for the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions created in the production and transportation of our food, 11% of the total GHG emissions of veggies comes from delivery transportation and only 1% of the total GHG emissions of meat is from delivery transportation.
the paper notes that the majority of the GHG emissions resulting from what we eat are actually from the application of nitrogen fertiliser and from the methane that cows and sheep burp. logically therefore, switching to organic will reduce the GHG emissions from the food you eat (no nitrogen fertiliser used) and switching from beef and lamb to other meats such as chicken, fish, pork, rabbit and of course kangaroo.
so whilst there is nothing wrong with eating local, you could make *much* more of a difference through other simpler actions like going organic and not eating beef and lamb, rather than tying yourself up in knots tracking down the exact provenance of every single thing that passes your lips.
the paper in question is by Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews, entitled "Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States" and is available here:
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/esthag/2008/42/i10/abs/es702969...