The eco-diet … and it’s not just about food miles
“I’m a bit worried about the food miles [debate] because it is educating the consumer in the wrong way. It is such an insignificant point,” said Ruth Fairchild at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff. “Those [foods] could have been produced using pesticides that have travelled all the way around the world. If you just take food miles, it is the tiny bit on the end.”A better system, she argues, would be one that considers all environmental impacts from farm to dinner plate.
One option is ecological footprint analysis, which takes into account the amount of land needed to provide the resources to produce food, both directly on the farm and indirectly from the energy that goes into growing, harvesting, processing, packaging and transporting it. A food’s impact is measured in “global hectares”, the notional land area needed to produce it. But she thinks that consumers are not yet ready for ecological footprint labelling and the science behind it is not yet watertight.