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]
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Of course, most people are going to create more CO2 driving those tomatoes home from market than in the miles he lists on those labels (since they are going to drive home with a single bag of groceries in a likely very inefficient car, where the plane, train, or truck that traveled those other miles is systematically filled with a huge amount of food.) And don’t get me started on the old, nasty, inefficient trucks the farmers use at my local farmer’s market. Localism isn’t a bad thing, but it can easily become one of those things that makes you feel good without actually having much impact on the problems that matter, especially when it is incompletely quantified (nearly to the point of being misleading) like it is in these labels.
August 11th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
I’m glad that whoever invented this is interested in making people feel guilty, rather than solving actual problems. Because adding up the mileage is ridiculous: it assumes that the marginal cost (in terms of carbon?) is the same for moving any unit of food a mile. But of course that’s not true; all else being equal, if a plane is departing half empty and an extra carrot ends up on board (from a veggie-exporting country), that reduces the amount of waste in the world.
August 11th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
they have trveled far
August 11th, 2009 at 5:39 pm