Food Miles is a measurement of the distance food travels from where it is grown to where it is ultimately purchased or consumed by the end user. How much of the food you will eat today will be locally produced? And how much will travel hundreds, if not thousands, of miles before it is delivered to your plate? The more food miles that attach to a given food, the less sustainable and the less environmentally desirable that food is. For example to get to Europe, orange juice from Brazil travels 12000 km; including pulping, concentrating, freezing, re-hydrating and packing all in different countries along the way!

To produce a small glass jar of strawberry yogurt for sale in Stuttgart, strawberries are being transported from Poland to western Germany and then processed into jam to be sent to southern Germany. Yogurt cultures come from northern Germany, corn and wheat flour from the Netherlands, sugar beet from eastern Germany, and the labels and aluminium covers for the jars were being made over 300 km away. Only the glass jar and the milk are produced locally. For one truckload of yogurt pots to arrive at a southern German distribution centre, a 'theoretical' lorry must move a total of 1005 km, using some 400 litres of diesel fuel.

But there is a whole range of further hidden miles that these calculations ignore. To grow the strawberries for the jam for the yogurt, the farmer uses fossil fuels to plant, spray and harvest the fruit, and the sprays he uses have also been manufactured and distributed at some environmental cost. The aluminium for the yogurt jar lids has come from mines many thousands of miles from the packaging plant. Then there is the machinery used for packaging the yogurt, which had to be brought in from Switzerland, perhaps, or Britain, to say nothing of the transport of the workers in the yogurt processing plant going to and from their homes every day. And finally, the transport of shoppers from their homes to the shops in order to buy the yogurt must be calculated. So the circle widens, at every point adding to the real costs of the yogurt, but which do not get added to the price and instead must be paid for in other ways at other times.

The vast distances that food travels 'from plough to plate' makes it vulnerable to oil supply, inefficient on a per calorie basis, and unsustainable in the long run. Flying commodities by air, which uses nearly 40 times the amount of fuel that sea transport uses, is now a regular feature of world trade. But cheap fuel can also be used to undercut local suppliers by bringing in commodities from further a field.

Combined with fair trade systems, many of these problems can be overcome by developing regional and local food systems that highlight and use local produce.

Examples of Things You Can Do

• Instead of buying imported orange juice when black currant juice is local and contains even more vitamin C. Better yet, make your own juice.
  
• Buy from the small farmers outside your local market, for example at Hunyadi ter in the 6th District.
• Participate in an organic vegetable box scheme like Open Garden Foundation or Szatyor.
• Pick your own