Far Food: Food Miles You Can See

With so much talk around the benefits of buying local foods – keeping money in local economies, lessening environmental impact and being both healthier and better tasting – the concept of food miles – the distance food travels to get to your plate – carries an increasing level of import. But short of better labeling and greater transparency on the part of distributors and supermarket chains, the process of understanding where your food comes from still requires a lot of legwork on the part of consumers.

Image Credit: Getty Images, Kin Lush/Flickr

With that in mind, we really like the Far Foods packaging concept by James Reynolds. As pictured in the images above, he envisions a system that highlights the country of origin and total transportation distance. While we’re not completely sold on the idea of additional packaging on food that doesn’t really need it – cellophane wrapped tomatoes just seem to miss the point – short of this flaw the underlying thinking is great, particularly as executed on the receipt.

Given the amount of data contained within bar code technology already, one suspects that a conscious decision on the part of the food industry to include more information about the food on preexisting labels (with readers installed in stores or on mobile devices) could easily eliminate the need for extra packaging. Something to mull over on your next trip to the grocery store or produce stand.

[via swissmiss]