When you stop and think about the miles that food travels it's crazy:
Buying food from local farms and farmers’ markets is not just good for your taste-buds, health and wealth, there are wider benefits too. Comparing some foods which travelled from field direct to farmers’ market or farm shop with the same products air-freighted to reach UK supermarket shelves from overseas, Sustain’s researchers found that the carbon-dioxide emissions associated with distribution were 650 times lower when food was bought locally from a farmers’ market. The ingredients for an air-freighted Sunday lunch created 37 kilograms of greenhouse gasses but when bought from local farms only 58.2 grams of greenhouse gasses were released – a reduction of 99.8 per cent. (From
www.sustainweb.org)
I've written an article for Health & Goodness on seasonal food and food miles too.
