The government is publishing a report this week, called Food 2030, which paints a pretty dire picture of the state of our food supply. In short it looks set to warn that as things stand we couldn’t cope with unexpected disasters or disruption to the supply chain through a fuel protest.
That’s as good a reason as any for us to be digging up our lawns and planting our own veg. Forget about the financial savings: if you want to adopt the ultimate siege mentality, they are the kind of skills that could save you from going hungry when things take a turn for the worse.
Most worrying, though, is that, as the Telegraph reports,
In a controversial move the report will urge consumers not to insist on buying locally-produced food, because doing so would reduce the prosperity of farmers in developing countries.
You have to admit that there is no right answer here. I prefer to buy locally wherever possible, and all of the fruit and veg that we don’t grow ourselves comes loose from the market rather than pre-packed from the shops, as I believe there is a greater change of it having been grown closer to home that way.
The trouble is, that does nothing to help the struggling economies of the developing world, where the climate is often better suited to growing fruit and vegetables anyway.
The Catch-22 in all of this, though, is the environmental impact of global shopping. Buying Kenyan grapes in December, or Zimbabwean beans in November may help the farmers in those countries, but those same farmers will be among the first to suffer the global effects of the warming brought on, in part, by the carbon output of flying their produce to the UK.
With no absolute right or wrong answer, it’s up to each of us to make up our own minds. Mine sits firmly on the side of calculating food miles, and trying to keep them as low as possible.
Am I right? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Image: Vegetables in whole food markets by Masahiro Ihara
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I’m with you. Buy local wherever possible. My biggest beef with the supermarkets is poor labelling – I think most people buy fruit and veg without having a clue where it’s from because it’s so hard to SEE where it’s from. I always check now, and recently found onions for sale in Morrisons, where one sort were English (which I bought, obviously) and the others were from AUSTRALIA!?! I kid you not. WTF?!