Food Miles

Buying organic food used to be enough to separate the Cheetos eater from the food snob.

This year, two major events confused the divide. Wal-Mart began selling organics, and two big outbreaks of E. coli infected bagged spinach and food from Taco Bell.

Simply considering whether dinner was grown organically was no longer enough. Concerned parents, greenmarket shoppers and the rest of the food elite began calculating “food miles.”

Food miles are determined by estimating the distance food has traveled to get to your plate. This generates more decision making: Are organic bananas really worth the cost of the jet fuel that carried them from Peru? Does an apple grown a few hundred miles away taste better than one grown 2,000 miles away? Is it better to support the local garlic farmer or the one in China?

Eating a meal that hasn’t traveled very far doesn’t assure that it won’t be infected with E. coli, but the odds are better. And it saves having to wait around while the Food and Drug Administration searches through thousands of acres of lettuce fields and tests tons of manure at large-scale cattle ranches.

“My view is that long-distance food is scary,” said Joan Gussow, an author from upstate New York who is also an organic gardener. “I know where my meat comes from. My vegetables are from me. The bread I get locally. I pretty much get everything I eat locally except when I go out to eat.”

Chefs love the food-mile game, too. On menus, “local and sustainable” is the new “farm fresh.”

For food snobs who really need to separate themselves from the pack, consider throwing around the term “foodshed.” In the way a watershed supplies a region with fresh water, a foodshed supplies its food. It might be 100 miles wide or 500, depending on the growing area.

This concept is terrific if you live in Northern California, and not so great if you live in North Dakota.

¶ Tuesday, January 09, 2007